You don't want to use text files and CGI. If you ever have a busy web site, the performance will slow to a crawl. Even ISAPI and text files will slow to a crawl on busy sites. I rewrote the CGI stub(VFPCGI that MS used to include with .vfp.) to be ISAPI and it worked great on sites with little or no traffic, but, large sites were embarrasingly slow. Same thing with large West-Wind sites running in File mode. I've seen some large government sites using WWC file mode crawling. But, like you say, it deceptively easy to set up so a lot of people are using it this way.
You want to communicate between the ISAPI stub and the backend .vfp. server using memory instead of text files. This can be accomplished with either Named Pipes or COM. I just use the ASP.NET or ASP isapi stub and call the .vfp. dll backend server(which transparently uses COM to communicate) - it's simple, reliable, scalable and very fast...
>You you can use a CGI application and
>simple text file to communicate with VFP application installed as service, like VFPCGI.
>
>It is a much simpler.