With remote offices and people working offsite, Frontier Power Products Ltd. (FPP) needed a way to access data quickly. WestWind Web Connection (WWC) provides the plumbing to make Internet and Intranet-enabled applications. In the last 2 1/2 years Geoff has been working with WWC to build a series of programs that give the public, FPP's external customers, and FPP's employees access to their FoxPro data.

WWC became much more usable with the book WebRad: Building Database Applications on the Web. This book takes a new user step-by-step into building a WWC web application. To use WWC, you need to learn some HTML. A bit of Javascript can make your pages a lot more useful. You do have to rewrite your FoxPro code (because the Web is stateless), but you can borrow a lot of your existing code.

This presentation will look at how FPP moved from a pure FoxPro to a mixed environment, with people continuing to use FoxPro and the WWC versions of their programs on the Intranet. Geoff will cover a couple of WWC programs, how FPP handles security issues, and a couple of examples of simple data-driven graphs.

Geoff Bannoff considers himself a "corporate/management" developer, which is unusual for a FoxPro programmer. He started working with dBASE III in the early 1980s, then FoxBASE, then FoxPro through all of its versions. In 1984, he and two partners started an industrial manufacturing company. As the business has grown from 3 people to 64, from one branch to 3, and annual sales from $300,000 to $25 million he's built FoxPro systems to run all aspects of the business. Currently he spends about 25% of his time building programs and the remainder doing other business and management functions.