Niall,

>Looking at the options available it gets very confusing as to the best road to take. Dreamweaver MX, Web Connection, FoxWeb, VisualWebBuilder, ASP, XLM, FoxIsApi, etc all provide solutions but which ones should I concentrate on.
I'm looking for something thats flexible, expandable, cost effective, easy to learn and implement, and has low maintenance.<

When I first looked around (a couple of years ago) for suitable tools for using Foxpro on the web I tried the three main 3rd-party products around at the time, West Wind's Web-Connect, Prolib's Active Foxpro Pages (AFP) and Eon's Foxweb. I also looked at Rick Strahl's book 'Internet Applications with Visual Foxpro 6.0' and investigated using VFP with FoxISAPI, ASP, COM objects, etc..

When I was asked by a client last year to create a web-based search application for their products, I settled upon Foxweb the main reasons being as follows...

* Very easy to install and configure.
* Documentation - Easy to follow, HTML-based with good cross-referencing.
* Cost - very reasonably priced.
* ASP-style programming, but using our (beloved) Foxpro code between % tags instead of VBScript or JavaScript (although you can still use these scripting languages if preferred, or even mix them up on the same page!)
* HTML pages can be generated entirely using VFP, or template pages can be used with variable data inserted where required.
* Not everything has to be scripted - pure VFP code can still be in procedure files or class libraries if preferred (faster than placing large chunks of code between % tags).
* Very impressed with Foxweb's website (www.foxweb.com) - it's one of the neatest and easily-navigable sites I've ever come across.
* Support - there is a message board to which I get useful answers to posted questions within a day, and talk directly to the team of developers.
* Extremely fast - more limited by speed of intra/internet connection than anything else. Data access is extremely fast (as we are already used to) because FoxWeb doesn't use ODBC or ADO, it access tables directly via VFP.
As with VFP, Foxweb can also access c/s backends such as SQL-server via remote views.
* You don't need to be an IIS expert, although some knowledge is useful.
* Runs equally well on IIS and Apache servers.

I know that competing products also have many of the above features, but in the end it was the appearance and 'feel' of the whole package that made me feel comfortable with Foxweb than any other option.

My preferred tool for creating pages is Dreamweaver. You can use WISYWIG to place objects on a page, or hand-coding if you prefer, or a mixture of both. It's very flexible, and unlike other products like FrontPage, does not try and reformat your code or add extra 'bloat' to your HTML pages.

Feel free to contact me privately if you require any more information.

HTH

Alan Harris-Reid

BaseLine Data Services
Tel: (44)1364 643343
Email: blinedata@aol.com