Hi Richard,
..Rainer's comment is critical:
not critical but my life experience starting with html 1.0 in the late 90s up till now.
In the past we were happy , to have something on the web server, written in ksh and echoing html to the rest of the world.
Then a lot of ideas came and the enlightenment. HTML is stateless, it needs a refresh, and html is not the same as on the client. Java time : but : you are in a sandbox, servlets are a cool thing, but its not very nice to have a lot of code in each webpage... And then flash, and all the others... Ms went .net the rest went J2EE.....but it took long to get a real app on the web. And one big thing: do you have a style guide before the start, do you own all the copyrights on backgrounds, images, styles, templates...
Does your hoster like your infrastructure: you could make very nice web apps with ms tools, but only a few hoster accepted the ms plugins on the server...
So you could go the lamp way or run your own datacenter ( I had a server for my zope sites).
Today a lot has changed, in the past we even didn't think about having permanent refresh in the browser to push and pull ajax data. But before you start: get the books : writing secure code, web masters admin guide, ... hackers bible, and if you have a change to get the conference slides from the german dfpug conference about the migration a app to web from rainer becker ( I guess its the 2012 conference)....
For a meeting I had to travel a long way, so here some of my brainstorming to open the list.
What we have today.
A enterprise framework, with a active data dictionary and vfp-data or remote data..
A first step would be replacing the gui ( hope you have all your logic in a business class instead of the forms, and the report engine ( if somebody still needs it ). But its cool to have one, its the simple gui ever. Get a query or build one from a link and echo a html page or a pdf, which can be rendered by any device.
Or you can go the other way, use VPME as a app container ( runs only on ms environment) talking to a server app via soap, ajax,....
Next way, keep the database and replace everything by a real web app ( avfp, lianja, servoy, spring roo, ruby on rails, Omnis Studio or .net)
The key point is : every things sounds cheap, as long you are in a developing stage. As soon you say the magic word productive server, you will be amazed about the price..
What I have tried and why..
1. VFP Data with odbc running on a lamp with drupal. Why Drupal. Its very powerful, you get a lot of modules even shops... And it cares about the presentation on any device as its based on templates and skins.
But you have to learn php and the frameworks
2. VFP Data with obdc running on a lamp with OpenAtrium ( based on drupal). It has the drupal core and it runs out of the box.
3. Servoy : they put a lot of work in it, there is even a vfp wrapper available. But the only thing you can keep is data. And remember the magic word production....
4. Omnis Studio : very powerful, but a complete new infrastructure, and the magic word again production
5. OpenCms ( with a J2EE App-Server -Glassfish). The only thing u can keep is the data via odic. But also very powerful and one of the cms standards. But you have to learn Java.
6. Eclipse with Java7 ( back to my roots) Java has made a great step forward to put a lot of things in one place you had to do before with spring and other things.
7. Eclipse with Java7 and the Vaadin framework
8. Eclipse with Java7 and Spring Roo
9. Eclipse with Java7 and the type framework, scala and aka
After all that I ended with VFP9, VPM9 and AVFP. But I don't have to serve interaction on the appserver side... This makes the thing simple as I have only a few pages to save, which ( ok not nice but doing the job) still hold code in the forms instead of a abstraction layer and a controler.
The list is open... happy to read about your experiences.
Rainer
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about me see:
https://www.xing.com/profile/Rainer_Greim