>We are in the planning stages of an application. VFP will run the app with
>SQL 7 as the database. Part of the interface for this app will be a web
>sight where users can log on and view reports and enter information. My
>co-developer suggests using LINUX as the web server and PERL & MYSQL (or
>equivalent) to handle the all of the web stuff and periodically synchronize
>the web dB to the actual one. I on the other hand, knowing nothing about dB
>transactions tied to the web, thought about using a product such as
>West-Wind or Foxweb. I would like to hear some opinions and or see some
>documentation on the subject. Thank you in advance.
>
>Respecfully,
>James Grapes
>
>jrg@nospam_ids6000.com

James (or Jim),

I've recently switched to web apps using ASP/VB COM+ components and SQL 7 and find it a very versatile and productive development environment. I think you'll find ASP very useful as well as easy to learn. For my ASP pages I'm using HTML (of course), VBScript for server side scripting (which is a pretty decent scripting language IMO) and JavaScript for client side scripting (another very decent scripting language). The result has been powerful, highly functional, and fairly high performance apps that run in any browser. I don't even have to use MTS any more for my components with Win 2000 (thank God).

I'm not much on the LINUX platform but I suppose some day I'll get sucked into the dark abyss of open source (just like I did with VB/ASP/SQL - I used to be a diehard foxer). I don't think that PERL is going to be the "drug of choice" for web developers that are starting their careers at this time, mostly people who have been doing it for a while use PERL. With such great languages as VB, VBScript and JScript, who needs PERL? MYSQL is good if you're a UNIX maven who likes to muck around on the command line a lot - not sure how robust or supportable it is. I would think you'd want to go with a commercial product like SQL Server (running on Win 2K of course) or if you're tied into the LINUX/UNIX platform go with ORACLE - why screw around?

Everyone here on the UT raves about West Wind and for good reason I'm sure. Even if you go the VFP web route, you'll want to get some experience with ASP in and of itself - it will help you understand web development more easily to see the HTML and scripting working side by side. You can even develop your ASP using the crappy Notepad text editor (Visual InterDev is highly superior - I don't understand why someone would subject themselves to the banality of Notepad when they can use a sophisticated editor like VID which offers color coded syntax and intellisense etc.). Also, there is much more demand for these skills (I don't see too many listings in the paper for VFP web developers unfortunatly but this could be changing with the success of West Wind WebConnect).

At any rate, have fun. If you're not having fun you're doing something wrong!

Regards,

-JT