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Using PHP,Apache ASP, Perl or Java to call COM objects seems to be unnessecarily complicated.
I need to distribute my VFP Web Appl to a large number of sites with automatical installation.
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Um.... I'm sorry this seems complicated to you. However FYI PHP, Perl, and java are usually normal parts of an Apache web server installation .

If you want to distribute an Apache based server side app to a large number of sites you are going to have to learn something about how people who work with Apache are accustomed to working and configuring their installations <s>.

Now *this* is probably not a good idea...

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So the problem is interfacing Apache with windows service.
I'm currently using VFPCGI for this.
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... and I am most puzzled by the following:

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Since it is impossible to call SOAP from IE 5.5+ or Firebird directly,
it seems that using SOAP does not have any benefits.
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How did you reach this conclusion <s>? Of course you can send a SOAP message from IE, although your HTML page have to use some script.

Not sure about Firebird, I don't have the personal experience there. But John Udell and Joel Spolsky both use it. So it has to be pretty capable <g>.

*** You can absolutely call web services from browsers. **** Having said that, it's irrelevant!

In the scenario I described, you wouldn't be using the SOAP method from the browser, for goodness' sakes.

You want your browsers to access an Apache server. Now, the browsers themselves might or might not be making a SOAP request when they do this, I don't really care.

I'm saying your VFP web service resides on another web server, and your Apache server makes the SOAP request to your VFP web service on this other server.

In an n-tiered architecture, the web server layer is often a different machine than some of the application services. If your application services are to be provided partly by VFP, there is no reason to assume that they aren't on a different server to which your web server layer has private acces.

This is done all the time, for all kinds of reasons. It's overkill in some cases, absolutely necessary for others (especially when there are multiple partners providing the end result.

It sounds like this is the first time you are thinking through some of these issues. FYI, I have done this so many ways, in so many scenarios, it is difficult to know where to begin <s>.

From what you describe below I can make some guesses:

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I'm a preffessional FoxPro Developer. I'm starting to developing a large
VFP application which generates html pages to number of customer sites, each having separate web servers

The URL is the same as called from brower.
The only infference is Mode=XML parameter which causes my appl to return
a Content-Type=Text/XML data instead of usual Text/HTML html page...

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I'm going to guess that you chose Apache for your customer sites' servers because it doesn't require the $ outlay <s>.

Meanwhile, if at least some of these other web servers getting info from your application are *not* Apache,and are not deployed individually to your customer sites, then you already have your answer.

The VFP web service resides on a separate server. The Apache web server that interfaces with your browser users makes the web service call to that other server. Generally, this is done with SOAP.

Then we can start talking about SOAP interop -- the reason I asked you which version of Apache. Because Apache and MS SOAP interop but there's some stuff you have to know (mostly regarding translation of data types) to get these things to work as expected.



>L<