>I've fooled around with sending & receiving some XML messages/data over the Internet and, quite frankly, have not been satisfied with the response times. I fell back to sending data via HTTPS with much better response times.

Response times, or parsing times? XML and HTTPS are not mutually exclusive, IOW, they are different protocol layers.

On an intranet, I can start a form that uses a single cursor grabbed from a web server using my framework in about .75 seconds. A form that uses 4 or 5 cursors (lookups, child tables, etc) takes roughly 2-3 seconds. Oddly enough, the times don't vary much with remote (Internet) access.

>Is your framework Intranet-based or both Internet & Intranet-based?

Either one. The server resources are specified with a URL- this can be a loca intranet server, or a remote box.

>Also, have you done any timing tests with VFP7 v VFP6 and the new XMLTOCURSOR & CURSORTO XML commands in VFP7?

No. But that's because I am not using VFP cursors in the middle tier, I am persisting ADO recordsets, and these new functions don't work with that XML format. Persisting the RS with a stream object is pretty quick, but parsing that XML back into a cursor can get slow with a large dataset. My test have shown that a Recordset with 10 fields can be parsed into a cursor at roughly the rate of 100 records per second. Increasing the number of records or fields both increase parsing time proportionately. These test are on a Win2K box using MSXML3 and a 450Mhz processor. I haven't tried on my hotrod box at home, but my guess is that these times are going to vary proportionally with processor speed.