Hi Tarran,

Visual FoxPro can be a good backend server for a web application. I have written an example app using html as the presentation layer, perl cgi-scripts as the middle tier, and VFP7 as the backend Server. It's easy to do and really works. The perl script uses VFP's ODBC to connect to the DBC. Although I used perl as the middle layer, I could have just as easily used VBA and made it an ASP program. I have an article on this subject that will be included in the May UT magazine. This is just off the top of my head:

MySQL:

1) MySQL is available from about any ISP
2) MySQL has built in security
3) MySQL is multi-threaded
4) MySQL is SQL92 compliant so your app would easily port to other databases like Oracle, DB2, MSSQL, if you didn't use any of MySQL non-SQL92 extension. However, this would also be true of Visual FoxPro.

Visual FoxPro:

1) VFP makes it easy to write traditional desktop and client/server apps.
2) VFP provides more functionality when uning its native language to work with the database engine in the traditional non-three tier approach.
3) VFP is the logical choice when supporting existing apps. You can develope a web app to expose a portion of an existing VFP app to the www. For example, you could build a web based shopping cart app that inserted, updated, and deleted records directly in tables of a sales module of a native VFP file share app. This eliminates the need to import records from a MySQL database, or the need to rewrite an existing app using a three tier approach.

LelandJ