Can I get my existing FoxPro applications to run over the web?

Because of the nature of the World-Wide-Web, there is no way you could take an existing FoxPro application and just get it to run over the web. Web browsers receive information in a language called HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) and send information back to servers using HTML forms. In order for FoxPro to communicate with web browsers it must be able to read the input of HTML forms, and format its output as HTML text. For this reason, the input and output routines of existing applications will have to be re-written. Other procedures handling the logic of the application, (e.g. queries, data-updates, etc.) can remain as is.

In some cases existing reports can be used without modification, by re-directing their output to a text file and then sending it to the browser (<PRE> tags have to be added at the beginning and the end of the text). This method works adequately if you have a large number of reports that you want to convert in a hurry, but the output appears just like an ASCII text dump with no formatting. If, on the other hand, you want to have aesthetically pleasing reports that take advantage of the HTML formatting tags, you will need to either include these tags in the reports, or use a different method to create HTML output.