Introduction

Using any of these products would mean a substantial investment in training and eventual dependence on the base product. Therefore the following review was done to help our Company decide on which was the better product to use.

Review Findings

· Architecture - WWWC has clearly separated the data layer (FoxPro or any ODBC compliant), Business Rules (Web connection Server App) and to communicate with the Front-end wc.dll (ISAPI). AFP uses code directly embedded in AFP pages, which is complex in structure and less secure.

· Scripting - This is one clear advantage AFP has over WWWC. It allows scripting within a HTML page (with the extension of .AFP) like ASP scripting. But for this, there is no program or utility, which can be used to test & debug directly the AFP script. Also the error message displayed in the browser when a command fails is not much useful. Web Connection supports scripting to a certain extent via Templates. Web Connection even supports some debugging support if you run compiled scripts in which case you can step into scripts with the debugger.

· WWWC has a richer collection of Extra tools & utilities (Eg. VFP Form - > DHTML converter, wwIPStuff etc). Interestingly AFP suggests using wwIPStuff to send emails from Fox

· WWWC is far more widely used than AFP. The only site I know of in which AFP has been fully deployed in is VFUG, which has close links with the AFP developers (This observation is dated 25July00).

· Application Design - WWWC uses all the VFP OO features including classes, prgs, even forms (for QUICK DHTML conversion) where AFP uses only the standard FoxPro language elements for scripting.

· Complexity - Installation & Documentation of AFP is a bit complex and documentation is poor. WWC is well documented.

Conclusion

My preferred choice is WWWC. However we may choose to use AFP for FoxPro scripting in addition to WWWC. However the non-standard of AFP will be clearly beaten by ASP Scripting.

Y Sivaram
Technical Development Specialist
QA Software Pty Ltd
Melbourne, Australia