>If there is any sense to bolting Fox to a web service - leveraging existing functionality is it - I agree 100%.

Well, existing functionality is a great reason, but not the only. Because of Web Services the total cost of ownership of a VFP + Web Service solution could be signifcantly lower than an expensive database server + Web Service solution.

But this Web Services isn't what my question to Claude was about. Web Apps themselves. I think ASP.NET Web Forms makes .NET the hands down winner over VFP. Even though VB.NET might be somewhat new, its not radically different than VFP and I think we both agree on that.

But, since you assert that the only sense in Fox based Web Services is to leverage existing functionality, I will challenge that assertion with the following Editorial piece I've submitted to News.Com:

Do Web Services Make Database Servers an Obsolete Technology?

In the beginning, there was the database file. It was a pretty handy thing. Computers were only useful because they could manipulate data, and storing data in files was the only way to persist data between user sessions. As applications grew more robust, disk drives began store more and more data, and networks allowed multiple users access to the same data the database file was strained.

The solution? Centralizing data access; enter the database server.

What's great about the database server, the software developers realized, was that centralized data access meant more scalable, more secure, and more stable applications could be written.

What's great about the database server, the makers of development tools recognized, is that they can license the servers by installation.

What this meant is for a good number of years the developers and the toolmakers lived happily. Things were good.

But with the introduction of Web Services this picture changes. With the application logic centralized on a web server, data access is automatically centralized regardless of whether a database file or database server is a part of the solution.

Because of this we should now re-evaluate the question: which is the better solution, database files or database servers? I think that the database file is the better solution because it is easier to maintain, more portable, and less costly.

What is included in maintaining a database? First the database must be created. With a file this is very simple. You create the file, walla. With a server there is more sophistication involved. The database server must be loaded, if it can be loaded at all. There are instances where the server can't be loaded. For example, if your employee management software relies on SQL Server 7.0 and you are trying to load it on your computer that is already running SQL Server 2000 for your accounting software, you're going to have a problem. You would need to create and administer a small network just to run two applications. You'd never deal with this if you used files to store your data instead of a server product.

Once created the database must be secured. If you are using files your data is secured like every other file on your computer or network. With a server solution you will need to know extra skills to administer the security of the data. This amounts to spending extra resources to secure the data. Also, this server is now an attack surface on your network, which will require patching and updating the software as holes are discovered.

And lastly the database needs to be backed up. Again, no special skills or knowledge is required to backup a database file beyond what is required to backup a word document or any other file. But with database servers often there is special process involved in backing up the data. To be fair, amongst the current database offerings the servers are known to have the advantage of being able to do live incremental backups of the data. But this is not an inherent technical advantage to servers. It is merely due to the feature sets of the existing server products, and there are software solutions that can add this functionality to file based data systems.

The next major advantage to file based systems is the portability. For one, the database files can be copied from one location to another with ease, whereas the applications that rely on servers are not so fortunate. But more importantly there is the issue of platform portability. We are seeing a common trend in development languages, be it C# or Java, that applications are cross platform. Why can't the data be? Well, if we are dealing with simple files, the data can be. But if we are using a server we would have to find a server that runs on the new platform.

But what if the platform can't run a database server? For example, todays powerful cell phones and other smart devices. There are great applications that can be written to run on these devices, but you won't find an Oracle database server for your Samsung phone anytime soon! This means that even though the cell phone is powerful enough to run my application, it will still need to connect to an even more powerful database server to access the data used by the application. Unless of course we are not using a database server and are instead dealing with simple files for storage.

And lastly, the cost of the solution. If you wanted to load Oracle or SQL Server onto a web server for an internet application and a corporate server for an internal business application you could be looking at tens of thousands of dollars for each instance of the software. But if you were to buy something like Microsoft's Visual FoxPro to author your database applications you would pay the one time fee of $500 and distribute your applications royalty free, databases and all. And that's just for the software. I mentioned earlier that extra resources were required to maintain a database server versus standard files, which again lowers the total cost of ownership for the file-based solution.

So, will Web Services eventually make database servers obsolete? If next generation file based databases are allowed to develop and thrive in the market place under the dominating eyes of the database market leaders who make a pretty penny with their databases servers, I think the answer is clearly "yes."