At DevCon we were demoing the <a href ="www.biotechinvest.com">www.biotechinvest.com</a> website. This website was created by Flash over a period of four months using the COMCodebook framework. Yep, that's VFP running in the middle tier of the website.
One of the nice things I am just beginning to realize about COMCodebook is that it allows each developer to focus on only what is important to them. The UI person can focus on creating the UI, whether it is in ASP, VB, or VFP. They need to know nothing about coding in VFP to create the UI and connect it to the middle tier. The middle-tier VFP guy can focus on the business rules and not worry about what the UI is doing. The DBA can focus on database design and not worry about how it is being accessed. The only thing any of these developers have to agree on beforehand are some of the object interface standards. For example, they must agree that Customer.GetProxy() will return the customer id and customer lastname + "," + customer first name and not customer id, customer last name, customer first name. Once they each know how to communicate with the other, though, they can go off and do their own thing. I think this is pretty cool.
To get an idea of just how cool this is consider the fact that I could easly create a VFP front-end for the BioTechInvest web site in probably less than a day (not inlcuding making it look pretty). Or, the web site could switch from using SQL Server 7 as a backend to Oracle in the amount of time it would take to change a few lines of code and recompile DLLs, once the data was sitting on the Oracle server.
Michael G. Emmons
<a href="mailto:MichaelE AT flashcreative .D.OT com">MichaelE@flashcreative.com</a>
Senior Consultant
<a href="http://www.flashcreative.com" class="white" onmouseover="style.color='#00cc00'" onmouseout="style.color='#0000ff'" title="Flash Creative Management Web Site">Flash Creative Management</a>
©2000 Michael G. Emmons |
