>I was actually hoping there would be someway to write the app like a regular desktop app, and then grab the data from the server.
>

I have a client that does just this. All servers are here in San Diego, and they have facilities all over the place--include a major facility in Guatemala. We use Web Connection for handling the data transfer, using HTTP. Guatemala tends to have rather slow and unreliable dial-up service, so our scenario is worse than yours. What we do is transfer the data we currently need for the task at hand to the local workstation. Data is transferred by extracting the data we need on the server side, putting it into a temp DBF, zipping it using Dynazip, and sending that to the client. The client will also send updates back to the server in a zipped DBF.