We have a serious challenge for a current project I am working on.

We do a major downsizing of various applications from the main frame to the Intranet. The biggest restriction is that everything need to be run inside of a browser. But, we can't run it as the Universal Thread is running or how most of the current DBF applications on the Internet are running presently. We need to only call the Web server for the downloads and uploads. This should be similar to the Universal Thread Navigator but running inside the browser.

In fact, we need to call the server at first to bring in the browser memory a file where the size is ranging from 1k to 80k approx. Then, the user need to work for a while (list, sort, filter, edit, add, delete, etc.). When the work is done, they will upload all the changes.

The restriction are the following:

Netscape browser 4
Netscape server
Windows NT 4 server

Since we are in Netscape browser, we can't use ActiveX. We are now focusing on building a plugin. This will run at Ethernet speed. So, the time to download and upload is not a factor.

At this point, we are not sure of which environment we will do the programming in order to have a plugin result at the end. We are focusing on Visual C++ and, if a Visual FoxPro application can be turned into a plugin, we will consider it as well.

The question is what will be involved in turning a small Visual FoxPro application into a plugin? Or, is this only doable from Visual C++?

If a plugin can't be done from Visual FoxPro or from Visual C++, do you know if, at least, we can call a plugin which will fire a local EXE, outside the browser, in order to start Visual FoxPro?

Any other feedback about this kind of implementation is welcome?