If you try ActiveVFP(www.activevfp.com), it's very easy. AVFP is a tool that puts it all together so you don't have to struggle with COM or even know it's working in the background. All of that is taken care of transparently.
Yes, you could program Named Pipes or even DDE(which I tried once for this) from within ISAPI. However, this is already done by Foxweb and AFP(why re-invent the wheel?). WWC uses COM EXEs for its memory mode and text files for its default mode. AVFP uses .vfp. COM mtdlls at all times called from ASP.NET or ASP(ISAPI)...
>Creating a COM objects in VFP for Web seems to be too complicated to me.
>Maybe there is a way for VFPCGI to send some messages to VFP application sitting in memory without using text files.
>Isn't this faster?
>
>>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.