>Hi All!
>
>I would like to discuss about 3-tier model and about the best way to do
>this in VFP. I read the article on MS site about this, but think that
>making new OLE server every time for each new project not so good apporoach
>to RAD. Any thoughts and ideas are welcome ;)

I think you misread that. OLE Automation servers should only be built
for business objects that are to be encapsulated. As such they are typically
fairly static and don't change frequently.

The idea behind Automation is to be able to reuse business logic from
a variety of sources (read non-VFP) and to be able to spread the load
from a single machine across the network.

OLE Automation for the sake of using it is not a good idea at all.
Since the code is a VFP class anyway, you can just as soon pull the
code into a project directly and not deal with the overhead and
configuration issues of the Automation interface.

I would recommend Automation servers for these typical applications:

* Business objects that need to be reused by different dev tools
(this is getting to be more common all the time).

* Classes that are in heavy use and might need to be remoted to
other machines. The move from Automation to DCOM is relatively
painless and requires no code changes on the client.

* Web applications. This is really an extension of the first
point as you're interfacing VFP into other technologies.
ISAPI (Web Connection, FoxISAPI) can call Automation servers,
Active Server Pages can instantiate Automation objects directly
of ASP pages.


+++ Rick ---