I need to create a desktop application. It is the typical app with data
entry screens, reports and so on . . .

The job is small so I don't want to use an expensive solution like
Oracle. That would be overkill. Instead, I wanted to use a department
wide solution like Foxpro. The catch is, this department is in two
offices. One in New York and the other in London. Catch number two is,
I would like to avoid installing dll's and the rest of it. No local
installs if possible.

My question is, can I put the desktop application on a server and have
the New York and London staff use it?

You could use Terminal Server and Terminal Services on the workstations.

Probably not the best solution if your screen I/O requirements are busy, or
for large numbers of users. But for a small app, it would probably work just
fine.

Another option would be a web server-based app, with clients connecting
through their browser. Even less capable from a U/I perspective, but there's
also less traveling across the wire.

Dan

richmarin (AT) earthlink (DOT) net wrote:

Dan Freeman wrote:
have found that while an HTML application tends to scale better as far
as number of users VS CPU and memory, that terminal services uses much
less bandwidth (providing that you don't have a lot of animation and
stuff going on). You might want to limit the terminal server to 256
colors if bandwidth is an issue, but terminal server is amazingly
sparing of it's use of bandwidth. Especially with later versions of VFP
which seem to work much better, especially if you use the BITMAP=OFF in
the config.fpw as only what changes on the screen gets sent across the
wire. With HTML most of the page has to get sent every time, and we
have ALWAYS run into occasional caching problems with HTML where the
browser will not always believe that the parts of the page have actually
changed.

--
Cy Welch
Senior Programmer
MetSYS Inc
http://www.metsysinc.com

Rich -
the quick answer is - SURE - but if you are not using TS or Citrix, then you
will eat up your bandwidth with all kinds of nonsense.

When you say - 'Put it on a server' - are you assuming that you can dump
everything you need onto a folder on the server, then have the users map a
drive to that folder ? IF THIS IS THE CASE - then its a goofy assumption -
there are bandwidth issues for file serving for VFP apps, spread across a
WAN.

OTOH -
if you were JUST doing the fat client stuff back at each desktop, regardless
of where it is, you could do a different thing with getting and posting of
data where it would not have such a nasty overhead. It's a trade off, but
its a nice tradeoff.

You may want to engage a consultant capable of doing real time bandwidth
studies on network traffic for the type of network you have, who is also a
capable VFP developer.

lemme know how it works out - I have fixed this type of thing a few times in
the past.
mondo regards [Bill]
--
===================
William Sanders / EFG VFP / mySql / MS-SQL
www.efgroup.net/vfpwebhosting
www.dotnetconversions.com
<richmarin (AT) earthlink (DOT) net> wrote