This is a certification prep application where users will take the sample tests online, on an intranet or on cd. On the web it will involve logins, creditcard payment, password creation/distribution, users answering test questions, tracking scores, associated app where content authors can collaborate online to create the questions, amongst other things.

Initially we want to run it in a virtual hosting environment to see how popular it will be before investing in a dedicated server. Each of the 26 certification prep tests is only approx. 4 Meg of data. I have to find a VFP-friendly web hosting site and since this is my first VFP web app, must make sure I have them load all that needs to be loaded. I have just started reading your book. Can you point me in the direction of the areas to pay specific attention to in regards to a virtual environment where I won't have full control of the whole server? From my readings, I don't see that XML will be involved since it seems that will be most useful for fat clients, is that right? Do you run your site on VFP or SQL-Server? Can you give me the name of a good VFP site out there that would be helpful to look at?

Thanks for all your help Rick,

Sally


>I've done a few things like this before for documentation systems.
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>The best thing to do is to build your UI in HTML format from the start. Have some rendering objects that can handle HTML generation for all output. That way you can use the same code on each platform to generate the UI. For Web you pass the HTML back, for desktop you can run the Web Browser control or automate IE.
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>User input is a bit more tricky to make generic. If you present your UI as HTML you'll need different mechansims to read the user input - on the Web you'll use Request objects while on the client you probably use the browser's object model to retrieve input.
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>If your app is some sort of doc management system you might want to look at HTML Help Builder. Although it's a Help generation engine it also works well for all sorts of other document types using custom templates.
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>+++ Rick ---
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>
>>I'm writing an application that will need to be distributed on cd (it will be run from the cd with no internet connection on a min Pentium 1, 64Meg RAM machine). I also need it to run on intranets and from a website on the internet (as a thin client - browser only on client pc).
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>>I'd like to get feedback as to the best way to develop this system so that I won't have to duplicate code. Obviously there will be some significant differences between the deployments but I'd like to have as much of a centralized base of VFP code as I can. I'd like VFP as the back-end on the web server. The cd version will look like a web site (use HTML pages).
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>>Thanks for any thoughts!
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>>Sally