>Many thanks for the info.
>
>Read the articles. A lot of good stuff in there.
>
>The more I read, the more I contemplate the problem of building and supporting a distributed program alongside an internet development - the more I am realising that its not going to be a straight forward task.

How so. You need to structure it correctly. I've built distributed applications relatively painlessly by utilizing the right tools to easily map data from client to server and vice versa. Passing objects across the wire and reassembling them on the other end allows you to basically code against a local object, then persist it across the wire as needed. If you can't do it right away, save the object to disk (local tables) then update when you reconnect.

Alternately you can just treat the Web server as a data backend serving straight data and using hte client side to pull and update the data over the Internet. Both approaches are rather straight forward.

If you build smart applications with business objects this should be a piece of cake because you can simply move the data between client and server sides with tools like wwXML.

>Different code bases and different interfaces - the only similarity would be the database. Ok, so there would be shared classes, just impemented differently :-)

Not at all. All my Web apps and client side apps use the same business objects. The only thing that's different is the front end.

>Could I just ask one last thing - what is your position with West Wind Technologies? I'm sure it will be something that I will be asked when I'm quoting your replies.

I'm president of the company...

+++ Rick ---