>>>4) Other options I am not aware of? (VFP is YAL, my background is LAMP development and relatively new to that).
>
>>You definitely will need a commercial VFP framework to develop this application. It will take care of many things for you.
>
>I've looked at frameworks a little. Point me towards sources, please?
>
>Thanks,
>Matthew

Go to http://fox.wikis.com/ and do a search on "framework".

You will find a plenty of discussion there. See what kind of a framework more suits your needs. Selection of the frameworks a difficult task. You probably cannot get the objective report on frameworks anywhere. Nobody knows thoroughly all of them at once, people have different requirements and preferences, the framework which suits one type of project may be not that great for another type, etc. You can just see different opinions (and docs of course) and compare. Really, you can say if the particular framework is right for you only after developing an application in it.

I worked with three frameworks - the original Codebook (which I found too heavy), Visual Extend (a good framework and I liked it, sometimes has too much code in the base classes, but many frameworks tend to do that as they are trying to satisfy as many needs as they can).
The last one I work with is Codemine and I found it very good. This is the lightest framework from what I seen in terms of "transparency" and the "closest" one to VFP itself.