Ready to start building powerful Web Applications with Visual FoxPro? West Wind Web Connection 5.0 is a flexible tool for building Web applications using the Visual FoxPro environment that you are already familiar with.

Web Connection provides a rich, object oriented, extensible, scalable and completely FoxPro based framework for building Web applications. Use Visual FoxPro to code, debug and run your applications against live Web requests.

Version 5.0 introduces a new Web Control Framework similar to ASP.NET, that lets you use the rich visual designers in Visual Studio and other tools, yet write all your processing logic with FoxPro code. Web Development has never more RAD than this! You can find a detailed technical overview in the Web Control Framework PowerPoint deck.

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Using these new tools let you use Visual FoxPro and Visual Studio together to leverage the best of both worlds. Design your layouts in Visual Studio using standard ASP.NET tools, and write your code with pure FoxPro that has no dependence on the .NET runtime. You can take advantage of the powerful HTML editor, the visual designer and property sheets to set up your visual layout and control behavior in Visual Studio. You can then hook up FoxPro code to control events that fire on the Web server.

In addition, the powerful state management features persist form data between page hits which allows writing fairly complex pages with very little code.

Not a fan of Visual Studio? No problem. Web Connection also works with other visual designers like FrontPage and Dreamweaver or any text editor. If you're a hard core code-only, "I don't need no stinking HTML Editor" kind of  guy, you can also write all of your Web related logic and UI using pure FoxPro code. You can generate all output yourself or create fully data driven applications. High level abstraction or low level processing - it's your choice.

Web Connection can also be used to build powerful distributed Web applications and provides tools to implement both the client and server of these smart client applications that can communicate from the desktop to Web server easily.

And best of all you can do it all from within the familiar Visual FoxPro environment, writing code, running and debugging your applications with live Web hits, right within the Visual FoxPro IDE. You can leverage the full power of the FoxPro language and reuse any existing non-UI code easily.

Getting started is easy

Getting started is easy too - we've provided easy wizards and configuration utilities that configure the Web Server for you and can setup new Web projects for you. All you need is a Web Server (Microsoft IIS or Apache 2) on a local machine, Visual FoxPro and a Web Browser and you are ready to go. You can do it all on a single Windows box. We'll have you up and serving your own FoxPro Web Requests in a few minutes. It's that simple! To help you get started and understand what's going on behind the scenes, the documentation includes several Step by Step guides and Walk-through tutorials to get you up and running and understanding the core features of Web Connection quickly.

Experience counts: We've been around the Block

Web Connection has been around since 1995 and it's a mature product. Back in 1997 Web Connection was featured as a general (not Fox specific) Microsoft case study for one of the largest Web retailers at the time. We've spent years finding optimal ways to create and manage FoxPro Web applications and this work and experience is reflected in the framework that is at your fingertips. And we've tried to make it easy. We build and work on applications with this tool continuously, so we know what you're going through - and like the rest of you, we like to make our lives as easy as possible. The result: We did the hard work so you don't have to. Web Connection is chock full of tools and utilities to take care of common and some not so common tasks in your Web applications. Web Connection is also a finely tuned engine that understands the unique requirements of Visual FoxPro applications and provides the highest level of performance, stability and administration features as a Web platform for FoxPro applications.

No black Box Code - we give you the FoxPro Source!

The registered version of Web Connection comes with full FoxPro source code so you can see how everything works. No black box code here (except for a small C++ ISAPI extension). Although the framework contains a large number of classes, only a handful of core objects are typically used in day to day operations. Web Connection's modular design uses a small core engine that handles the logistics of creating Request objects and routing requests to your code. Your Web application code implements classes that get called by the framework. You simply write standard FoxPro code using all the non-visual features that FoxPro provides. Web Connection takes care of routing requests to that class and provides you the core objects - Request, Response, Server, Session etc. - for input and output. With the optional Web Control Framework you additionally get a Form and Control based programming interface that uses familiar desktop concepts for creating Web output. The rest - and arguably the hardest task - is writing your business specific application code that drives the Web UI. It's easy because you're using FoxPro code to do it all! Web Connection is FoxPro through and through, so advanced features like Web Controls are data aware and support databinding similar to desktop applications with simple ControlSource binding and DataSources that can bind directly to Fox cursors.

Create your Output in a variety of Ways

Speaking of output generation - Web Connection makes that easy as well and provides a number of ways to generate your Web response. Want to do things at a very low level and generate all your HTML through code? You can do that. Or, rather want an easier and more Desktop like mechanism using rich controls to manipulate page elements and visual designers like Visual Studio to create HTML control pages with the new ASP.NET like Web Control Framework? You can do that too. In addition, there are many other tools to generate output quickly from FoxPro reports into PDF documents, generate output to XML and even create Web Services with very little code. From low level to high level output generation Web Conenction can do it all.

Support for Distributed and Desktop Applications

HTML not appropriate for your application? Web Connection also lets you build FoxPro desktop applications that can communicate with Web a Web server directly to pass data instead of Html. Web Connection includes client tools to easily communicate over HTTP with any Web server, and provides high level tools for communicating with Web Connection servers. One particularily useful tool is the wwHttpSql class which allows you to execute Sql Commands on the Web Server and return the results back to the client with just a few lines of code. Talk to FoxPro or SQL data with a simple Sql Passthrough like interface.

At a lower level Http, XML and SOAP support are also provided with native FoxPro classes that have no external dependencies. You can create SOAP based Web Services or use some of our built-in XML services such as the remote Web SQL service that lets you access databases through a Web Connection based Web Server from a client application. We also include the wwBusiness class, which is a light weight business object framework, that can optionally take advantage of remote Web data access and allows switching between Fox, SQL Server and Web data sources.

Web Connection also includes additional client tool support for SMTP and POP3 email, FTP, and raw socket access so you're ready to communicate with the Internet from the desktop in a variety of ways.

Don't take our word for it - try it out yourself!

There's so much more to Web Connection and the best way to find out about it all is to try it out for yourself. Web Connection is available in a fully functional shareware version that contains the full Web Connection framework, but doesn't include source code. With it you can build and test your Web applications to check out Web Connection's features and functionality.

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