>What is the best way to do this? I could create a COM exe on the accounts server and call it from the web server. That would insure that the process is run on the accounts server. However, I understand (correct me if I am wrong) that the exe file is not multithreaded, which means a separate version of FoxPro will load for every call to the exe file. If there are many calls simultaneously, this could bring down the server.

No that's not how it works. Actually that's the way DLLs work although they load individual DLLs into the Web Server where you can't see it.

COM DLLs are preloaded - you set up a pool of instances and those instances run the requests. if all in the pool are busy requests queue, but generally this shouldn't happen in a typical transactional application. Problems arise only if you have long-running requests, which is a problem for any type of Web application and there are workarounds for this with other tools in Web Connection.

>On the other hand, if I use a multithreaded DDL, won't that one acutally run in the process of the program that called it, in this case the WebConnection situated on the web server? If that is the case, I will still be back to having lots of data pulled through the firewall and the network.

Web Connection servers really shouldn't run as DLLs. That's not how the server is designed, although you can do that. If you do though you loose most of the admin features of the server, which is its strenght the reason EXEs are used in the first plcae.

>
>Maybe COM+ can solve this, but my problem is that I don't really know that much about COM+. I think COM+ would allow me to run a DLL in the a separate process, just like Transaction Server used to do? Is that possible? How would I do that?

yes, with EXE servers you basically get this same functionaoity with even more flexibility because each instance is individual and not tied to any process. The overhead in real resource terms is about the same although there's a little more overhead in the COM call (which for a typcial web request that does something is negliable).

I suggest you take messages like these to the message board as those that can answer these advanced questions including myself rarely check here (especially at the moment as I'm in Europe travelling).


+++ Rick ---