Web Connection is a complete Web application framework for developing and delivering scalable e-business solutions with Visual FoxPro. It is a proven development platform with a 10 year history that has proven itself stable for a wide variety of Web and distributed applications from small to large scale. With Web Connection you can get your FoxPro applications online be it for HTML Based Web applications, or XML based distributed applications. It provides both the client and server tools to build powerful applications in either environment.

Web Connection provides a powerful modular framework that interfaces FoxPro with the Web Server. The core engine provides all the interfacing and server infrastructure with various modules and handlers plugging into the architecture. You can choose from building applications that use pure code to generate output, to using high level modules like the powerful Web Control Framework that provides a rich object oriented control and event based model to build applications more efficiently using a more familiar and productive desktop metaphor.

Web Connection provides you with lots of choices for generating output from your application. At the lowest level you can do everything in code - respond to requests, picking up request data with pure code and running your own FoxPro code to generate HTML output. Other mechanisms provide more highlevel generation tools. The base script support allows you to use external templates with a textmerge like mechanism to externalize HTML generation. You can generate output from FoxPro reports to PDF files and use many high level functions to generate HTML from data quickly.

Finally there's the powerful Web Control Framework which manages many aspects of Web Page display. It automatically manages page state, and re-assigns control content on postbacks, allows persisting data across requests and can generate HTML from easy to use controls that you can programmatically access in your code. You simply set the text property of a textbox, vs. generating HTML for the entire textbox for example, and communicate with the textbox's properties to set things like color alignment, fonts etc. The Web Framework in conjunction with Visual Studio or the free Visual Web Developer allows you use a visual drag and drop design surface and easy to use property editors to visually design your layouts and set up control layouts. This is the recommended mechanism for building Form Centric HTML Web applications with Web Connection 5.0.

What is Web Connection?

Web Connection consists of two major pieces of software that make up the overall product. A small C++ based connector application (ISAPI dll) that implements the communication interface between the Web Server and your Visual FoxPro application, and an extensive framework of Visual FoxPro classes that makes it easy to build application specific Web code. The Visual FoxPro framework is object oriented, extensible and open and is shipped with full source code when you purchase the product. You can see how it works and if necessary extend or modify the base code. No black box code here!

The Visual FoxPro framework consists of classes that manage communication with the Web connector ISAPI extension. They handle server management and administration, retrieving server and browser form variables from the server making them easily available to your code and providing a powerful set HTML classes and support tools that make short work of interactively building the HTML required to display your application on the Web. Web Connection provides access to all advanced HTTP based features including displaying HTML script pages containing FoxPro code and expressions from disk. Many advanced features like HTTP Authentication, HTTP Cookies, Sessions, custom HTTP headers, request logging, remote administration and configuration and server load balancing are built into the product and easily accessed through the framework.

And you can use rich design tools with Web Connection, so you can use FrontPage or Dreamweaver and the like to design your page templates, or if you're using the Web Control Framework using Visual Studio or Visual Web Developer to design your pages graphically in an interactive WYSIWYG environment.

Built for FoxPro and the way YOU like to work

Web Connection is built to work with Visual FoxPro from the ground up. The framework itself is written in FoxPro and anything you can do with FoxPro can be used in your Web applications. You can use it to access database tables, run queries against FoxPro or SQL Server or Oracle databases, you can use business objects or you can access the data directly. How you write your application is really up to you - Web Connection provides only the plumbing - you provide the application logic.

You can use existing business object frameworks with Web Connection. There are countless applications out there that use Mere Mortals, FoxExpress, Visual MaxFrame and others with Web Connection. And Web Connection itself also includes its own light weight business object framework that you can optionally use. While a Business Object Framework of some sort is recommended you don't have to use it of course - you can use FoxPro code and data access directly just as well.

Distributed Application Support

Web Connection can also built Fat Client applications let you use Visual FoxPro desktop applications communicating with a Web Connection (or other) Web Server application. Web Connection includes a rich set of client tools that can provide connectivity over HTTP using plain XML or the SOAP protocol for Web Services.

With Web Connection you can run SQL queries over the Web and create and call Web Services. You can create custom XML services or use more standard Web Services. Web Connection provides the client side HTTP tools as well as high level XML conversion tools that make XML integration a snap. The Web isn't all about HTML and these data messaging features let you build powerful distributed applications that aren't limited by HTML output. Several examples that demonstrate rich client applications are also provided in the box.

Chock full of tools, utilities and utlility functions

In addition Web Connection also provides tools for sending and receiving email (SMTP/POP3), sending and receiving files via FTP, low level TCP/IP access. There is an included light weight business object wwBusiness class that provides an easy way to get into building more structured applications. A wwSQL component helps interfacing with Database servers like SQL Server and Oracle and there are literally hundreds of utility classes that can be used in your application be they Web or desktop based.

Documentation

There's ample documentation of all aspects of the Web Connection framework, covering both the inner workings of the framework as well as detailed reference materials and a number of detailed tutorials for the different processing mechanisms. Web Connection comes with over 100 small samples that you can check out and look under the hood of to learn and plug into your own code. And there are a number of full scale sample applications that demonstrate many of the framework features in a more complete environment.

Some examples include a WebLog example, the Message Board application and a PhotoAlbum application to name a few.

Web Connection has been field tested on a number of high volume sites and even back in 1996 there were sites running in excess of 2 million hits a day. Imagine what you can do on today's hardware.

So read on and get ready to get Webbified! It's never been easier to build Visual FoxPro Web Applications!

…and what it isn't

Web Connection makes it easy to build Web applications, but it will not take an existing application and run it on the Web as is. Work is required to convert the interface to an HTML based design and if your application mixes interface and database logic tightly, existing code might not be easily integrated into your new Web application. On the other hand if your business logic is separated clearly from the interface then reusing business rules and other rule based classes or procedures will be easily integrated into your Web applications. Keep in mind you will have access to almost all of Visual FoxPro's wonderfully powerful features with the exception of VFP's GUI features!

Web applications are server based and respond to requests made from a Web page. Every action that occurs on a Web page generally fires back to the Web Server. In that sense Web applications are not truly event driven but follow a more rigid transaction based Request and Response model. Web Applications also are stateless and that imposes additional considerations. The short of it is that Web applications by nature are VERY different from Desktop applications.

The new Web Control Framework provides a programming model that is conceptually similar to Desktop Form development and is the recommended approach for first time developers as it provides a familiar control and event based metaphor for building Web applications. But even though the model is similar, understand that you are still bound by the limitations of HTML/HTTP based interfaces, so don't expect to be able to EXACTLY duplicate desktop application interfaces via HTML. This is neither always possible nor desirable as HTML interfaces often have different design targets.

The core feature that Web Connection provides is the ability to continue to use FoxPro code to build your Web applications. You can write code in the tool you are familiar with and you can likely reuse any non-User interface code in your Web application.

Another option for existing standalone applications is to build a distributed application that use the Web as a data transfer mechanism. If you go this route your UI code can potentially be reused using data pulled down from the server using tools in the wwIPStuff library. See the Online Distributed Application Demo for an idea of what you can do.

If you're new to the Web take a deep breath and read on - there's lots of info in this document that will clarify the way the Web works. Web Connection makes it easy to leverage your FoxPro skills. Once you understand the basic flow of information over the Web things will fall into place and allow you to be productive very quickly. You can crank out quality high performance applications without having to learn all of the Web technology up front and you'll learn about Web technology as you use Web Connection to build applications.