Active Documents vs West-Wind, etc.. 1

[SmokeyJoe]

Can one run VFP 6 active documents app on the web without going to a third party scheme shuch as West-Wind, AFP, etc. and creating all of the forms in HTML, templates or scripts?

The VFP 6 documentation seems to say active documents can be run as is on the Internet. What am I missing?

Thanks

Smokey Joe

 

[foxdev]

Very sluggish performance. The idea is great, but in practice it is too slow to be generally usable. Robert Bradley

http://www.foxdev.com/

Got extra money lying around? Visit:

http://www.agrainofhope.org

 

[Walid]

Hi my friend,
Yes I agree with Robert performance wise about Active Docs.
But your question

The VFP 6 documentation seems to say active documents can be run as is on the Internet. What am I missing?

gave me the impression that you have a misconceptions about what is Active Docs is all about
So, please read this paragraph about active documents from Rick Strahls's point of view.

The problem with Active Docs is that they give the wrong initial impression to a first-time spectator. When you see a Visual FoxPro application running inside the browser, your first thought is likely to be, "Hey, that's an easy way to port my 100,000-line VFP application to the Web without modifications." If that's your goal you will be disappointed.
The most important thing to understand about Active Documents is that they are just like an application that resides on the local machine. For example, when you view a Word document in the browser, you need to have Word installed. If you run a VB Active Doc application, the VB Runtime must be available. The same goes for Visual FoxPro. The application executes on the local machine, not the server, regardless of whether the Active Document was downloaded from the Web. For Visual FoxPro Active Docs, this means you still need to have the Visual FoxPro runtime available on the client machine. There's no automatic mechanism for downloading and installing the runtime. This likely means you'd have to have a separate link to download and install the application, or at least the runtime, prior to running the Active Document from the Web—which is going to be a sizable download (at least 3.5 megs plus your actual application's binary).
In addition to the fact that you have to have Visual FoxPro installed on the client, you also have to understand that data access over the Web is not automatically provided. An Active Document application is no different than a standalone application. In other words, you can access local database tables just fine, or use ODBC to access SQL Server or any other ODBC data source. However, you don't automagically get the ability to access and share data on the Web server from which you downloaded the Active Doc! When you USE a database it's going to be using local disk access.
Yes, with only a little bit of work wrapping an application, you can run that application inside the browser. But it won't be able to access data over the Web unless you use some of the web data access technologies like using TCP/IP to access data over the Internet, using HTTP to marshal data from client to server and back, or using Microsoft's RDS. If you use those mechanisms you can access data over the Web, but then again this isn't really transparent to an existing application. Using these data access mechanisms is likely to require major retooling to take advantage of this data.

Hope this will help you. Walid Magd
Engwam@Hotmail.com