I’m trying to learn how to migrate a PC database application to run on the internet. I’ve been using VFP for years and West Wind Web Connection lets me host forms online. It really had me baffled because I couldn’t imagine how such a thing was achieved. I’ve read the book and am well into the tutorial. The answer turns out to be straight forward.
West Wind consists of a set of objects that are placed in an HTML document. You construct a small VFP program which starts the server. When the html doc is referenced with a browser the objects talk to another VFP program which accesses the data and business rules. The whole thing is terribly clever and works for other languages like Visual Basic. I’m gonna have to completely rewrite my existing forms to use it, but since they are debugged and running, it should be a simple matter of replication.
Reports are printed to a PDF driver and displayed on screen. And since the model handles multi-user file locking problems much better than native VFP, I’ll probably rewrite all my apps and those in the future using it. As apps require scaling, it’s child’s play to hook them to other databases like SQL Server and MySQL. Hell, I could even support Oracle and DB2.
Old dogs may not be able to learn new tricks, but I sure can. When the worm finally turns and we start making things around here again, or if our love affair with outsourcing ends, I’m gonna be the shiznit.
The hilarious part is all these years farting around with internet apps stands me well building web pages. And I never had to learn PHP.
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