Rick,

I'm happy that you took time to reply.

Yes, I have figured that holding my breath was not the answer. I shall simply have to do what I have always done to date, which is to look for other ways to skin the cat at hand.

I *HAD* been hopeful (much earlier) that I could actually *DO* what the hype was implying *WITH MY LIMITED SKILLS* (I guess I should really say ambition, since C/C++ and the bowels of WIN95/NT components do *NOT* turn me on in the least).

I certainly respect that people like yourself have accomplished this and I suspect that your plate will be full as more witness the REAL capability of what you have to offer.
I will continue to wait, mainly because there are several other things in this field which also interest me and which, at least right now, seem achievable with existing tools/techniques.

Cheers,
Jim N

>>I know that Rick Strahl (sp?) would probably disagree with me, but he is one who is ready, willing and able to get into the bowels of the OS and multiple components to achieve what is needed.
>>I am referring to all of the "HYPE" about how simple and easy and quick it is to accomplish these things using straight-up OLE and VFP OLE Automation Server.
>
>Well, not quite :-} I never claimed that it's easy. But I can tell you that most
>pf the issues we deal with in VFP also apply to VB, Delphi etc. It's a different
>mindset altogether and VFP has just joined the club on the first step up...
>
>I'll say that it's simple to build an Automation server. It is and even using
>the technology is easy. However, building it right is not, because you have to
>know how the scalability issues work. But the fact is that
>today all tools fall into this category. Building scalable application servers
>is a difficult task even if you do have true multi-threaded support (try doing it
>in C++ where you have to take care of all the internal serialization access to
>objects).
>
>My guess is that VFP will gain Apartment model threading in the next rev to
>match what VB can do, but even with this you still have to write code to
>properly load balance the servers. It's never easy...
>
>If you need multiple server for potentially long requests single instancing
>solves that problem nicely. Multi-threading without a threading model to
>go with it.
>
>>The recent (August) FoxPro Advisor mag had an article on OLE Automation, *BUT* that article was limited to making a VFP functionality available to some external application with very little effort.
>>That of course is decidedly *NOT* 3-tier application design/processing!
>
>True, but it does verify the claim that it's not difficult to implement the
>feature. You do gain the functionality without making any code changes - one
>switch basically does the trick. Not everyone needs to build a full scale
>server.
>
>>
>>In simple terms the big problem I have come across is that, AS I READ THINGS, *ALL INVOKATIONS ARE SERIALIZED*. That is, any Client's request *MUST* completely finish before another Client's request will be processed. Who can say what this would mean to Client response on any reasonable number of terminals, even with only "average" I/O and processing requirements????
>>It also appears to be a limitation of VFP at least that arrays *cannot* be passed back and forth to/from an OLE Automation Server.
>
>Both true, and major shortcomings of VFP. In addition, VFP cannot access a number of collection
>objects that are common with servers that are meant to work with VB, because VFP's array
>implementation differs from VB. Next months (October) issue of FoxPro Advisor will have
>an article on Active Server Pages and using Automation objects with it. I discuss the
>problems in detail there.
>
>>I have decided to wait until it can be done straightforwardly in VFP.
>
>Don't hold your breath. VFP will most likely never be multi-threaded.
>It's going to take middleware to do this. Microsoft Transaction Server
>will provide some of the scalability you're looking for, but not in this
>release of VFP. Apartment model threading is required to take advantage
>of MTS.
>
>+++ Rick ---