Hi guys,

first of all, many thanks for your rapid reply. Since this is turning into a bit of a "War and Peace"-size thread, I thought I'd re-post it to the VFP in general forum. I did read a review of the MM framework, but kind of rejected it because it's supported by only 2 people, as far as I can make out. I'd be more than willing to keep it in the frame as an option, though, if you say it can cut the mustard.

Here's what we're trying to do. We have a legacy billing application, entirely written in VFP, which supports a revenue stream Europe-wide of about $300 million. How's that for a success story? For all kinds of reasons (mostly to do with appearing to have a "serious" app, we're considering porting the database to Oracle. While we're at it, I'd like to rework the app into a true client-server app, probably a 3-tier (even if we decide that the middle tier should reside on each workstation, as a DLL).

Now, how should we go about manipulating the data in the Oracle database? Remote views would probably be good for the form (UI) stuff, but we've been looking at SQL pass-through as well. And there again, the two Explorer controls we've been looking at (Protoview and DBI-Tech) can apparently bind to ADO recordsets. I'm a little wary of ODBC, since I've had performance problems with it the past, but Oracle supplies a native OLE DB manager, which cuts out the need for ODBC. Is this any faster? Are there any traps to using this? Anyone out there with experience of this?

Finally, how does all this map onto the choice of a framework? I know that VFE maps data access onto a cursor object (hence the overhead and resulting performance hit). CodeMine uses some kind of Data Access layer, which is different to the business object approach.

So here I am in full "dither" mode. If anyone has any opinions, experiences or suggestions, I would be extremely grateful to read them.

Best wishes,
Neil