West Wind Web Connection 5.0
System, software and hosting requirements
System, software and hosting requirements
Web Connection Supports the following Web Servers:
Web Connection works with any true ISAPI compatible Web server. The product is designed primarily on Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), which provides best performance, stability and the full range of features. It also works well with Apache 2.0 and 2.2 and can be used with any any other ISAPI compatible server on Windows. We do recommend IIS especially IIS 6 or 7 as it provides the most stable and compatible platform for Web Connection on which Web Connection is developed and tested.
If you plan on working with the Web Control Framework you'll want to use Visual Studio 2005 or the free Visual Web Developer 2005. Web Control Framework pages are plain text, but in order to get the full design experience a ASP.NET 2.0 compatible environment should be used. Click here for more info on whether you need Visual Studio.
Otherwise plain HTML editing tools like FrontPage and Dreamweaver can also be used for editing standard templates or even Web Control Framework templates (although you won't get full designer support for the controls). Of course you can edit any HTML templates including script and Web Control Framework templates with any text editor like Notepad or even the Visual FoxPro text editor.
For development we recommend the max amount of memory you can afford as it will make your dev environment work more smoothly. With memory under $200 a gigabyte, it's easy to justify running with a 1 gigabyte of memory or more. Web development is very memory intensive especially if you use Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer. Also a fast machine won't hurt for development as you spend a lot of time flipping back and forth between different applications (VFP, Web Browser, HTML Development Tool etc.).
The latter option tends to be the cheapest but unfortunately it's not likely that you will be able to use it for your Web Connection applications as a WWWC application requires binary executables which are usually not allowed by low end Web hosting services. However, there are special providers that specialize in hosting binary based application services and you may be able to talk to your ISP to get them to host you in this fashion.
Co-location lets you have your own machine or one provided by the ISP at their facility. The big advantage here is that you have full control over the server and can configure it as you choose. This usually includes the ability to add custom user accounts, set the security permissions for the server, add remote access services for pcAnyWhere or the like. It also makes sure that your application is the only one running on the server so that there's no interference or problems from these potentially dangerous applications running on the server at the same time. Co-location tends to be more pricey but for the piece of mind and control can save you lots of headaches. Pricing varies, but typically runs $200 a month and up.
Finally your company may already have an internal Internet connection and you can hook your server application into that network. In this situation you probably have to deal with your network administrator and any of the security policies configured for the company network. If your application is completely internal to your company (an Intranet) then a public Internet connection is not required. If your application is used both internally and externally (an Extranet) you will still need with the security issues of an open Internet connection through your IT staff.
For a list of providers that are Web Connection and Visual FoxPro friendly and provide related services, see http://www.west-wind.com/webconnection/webhosting.asp.