John,

Interesting. Seems that for you that TEXTMERGE is almost, as we say, the whole enchilada.

I suppose, after thinking about it for a minute, that you're quite correct. If we all are thinking that VFP will find its most useful spot in the middle tier that that almost mandates that it have this feature. Combined with the new CURSORTOXML & XMLTOCURSOR functions and I'd think memo fields (for largish blobs of text) plus the ability to create and manage cursors and you have a tool that's pretty hard to beat.

I know that some (HVP?) have asserted that VB's string manipulation speeds are quite good. Do you have any emperical evidence either way?

Thanks again..

>Doug
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>IMHO it isn't an issue of VB tools, because VB doesn't have an inline/online parser by which I mean "textmerge". Without that, developing for the web is an order of magnitude clumsier, no matter what "tool" you try to use. I know of no VB tool that matches VFP's textmerge.
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>VB people are disbelieving that VFP comes with that testmerge facility. I've taken a record of JVP suggesting that it is WW, not VFP, that provides the textmerge. Actually WW would be far less of a player without VFP's textmerge and a canny fellow like Rick Strahl would have had a VB version out ages ago if there were a way. I'm sure RS would agree with that.
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>I've also had quite heated arguments with VB MVPs who, when they finish their stereotyped insults, cannot even understand the principle of textmerge (they think it is a glorified kind of "string concatenation") let alone accept that dead dog VFP has it. The idea that a single line of code might render a whole page is discounted as exaggeration.
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>I've said it elsewhere: IMHO the single most important feature in VFP in 2000 is textmerge. The rest *can* be done by other tools like VB, and some like Cold fusion can do in line parsing as well, just not as competently and without the data manipulation facilities and complex expressions that VFP'ers take for granted.
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>As for SQL: as of SQL Server7, there is no reason not to use it. Until Version 7 it could be quite hard (you could not create a logical [bit] field except in code, for example, nor could you alter null status for an existing field) but now you can. IMHO anybody who can use VFP can set up and manage a SQL Server7 database without much trouble. You can also use the free local variant to experiment, actually if you have a single COM WW app, you can use that free database instead of SQL Server.
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>I'd spend an hour or two looking at it IIWY.
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>Meanwhile I'm doing a crash course in Oracle lite for the WindowsCE. Heck. Thank heavens it's almost holiday time.
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>Regards
>
>JR