Hi Bob,

When it comes to creating web based applications, there are a ton of options. If you want to work with VFP DBC/DBF, most advise I've seen recommends a VFP com/dll which can be access by embedding VFP scripting language in an HTML page. The script calls the com/dll which brokers transactions between the HTML/VFP script frontend and the VFP DBC/DBF. Persoanlly, I don't feel like VFP makes the best backend database for a web application, because of a lack of support over TCP/IP, its is not sql92 or sql99 compliant, it uses fixed length fields that are padded, and its stored procedure are not available unless accessed form its native language. However, I have experimented with it using perl as a frontend, and it can be made to work in a satisfactory manner for anyone that would like to provide access to a customary file share application from a web page. With a little help from the Visual FoxPro team, it could be made to be a better choice for use as a web base backend databse using any frontend tool like VFP script, VBA, .NET, perl, php, etc.

My tool of choice for writing web based application is perl. It has a long history in the web application slot, it is well know and readily available from about every ISP, is works equally well across all platform and all web servers, and its entire language is available to the web application. Others might perfer PHP which also has most of the advantages I mentioned about perl.

Also, many VFP developers have moved to asp for web development. It seems to really be catching on. It is becoming more available through ISP all the time.

The newest member of the microsoft offering for web development is .NET. ASP.NET coupled with ADO.NET can be used to build web pages that use microsoft databases as a backend like Access, Visual FoxPro, MSDE, and MS SQL. I havn't done anything with .NET, but I'm keeping my eyes on it to see how successful it will be, and how it might help me sometime in the future. Current, .NET is Windows platform dependent.

There are some strong tool that can be used in the Linux platform for building web application at very reasonable prices. Apache, PHP/PERL and MySQL/Postgres are a few of the more popular choices for anyone that would like to explore this route.

For traditional development of a file share application like accounting software, using Visual FoxPro as an all in one product can't be beat. It can give your application a rich visual interface, provide strong language feature for writing business logic, and super fast native backend database engine. I have become more appreciative of Viusal FoxPro's native database engine, as I learn the added complexity of two tier and three tier applications using a non-native enterprise class backend server.

LelandJ