About

This is the official site of the FoxTrails web development framework for Visual Foxpro.

Fox Trails is a new approach to developing web applications with VFP. It is specifically designed to help speed application development time by eliminating tedious steps often associated with using VFP Com servers from ASP.Net. It is modelled after Ruby On Rails, integrating an MVC architecture with VFP.

A simpler approach

Web development may appear to be quite simple. Indeed, for static sites, a word processor may be all that is needed to produce a stunning site. However, as sites become more complex, or require integration with back-end databases, the complexity of such sites can soon get overwhelming.

In 2006, I was asked to design an AJAX-enabled web site for QuotePro, Inc. The web application needed to integrate with a mission critical insurance application written in Foxpro. The design called for use of a VFP COM server to expose the business logic for use by ASP.Net and the Prototype AJAX library. At about the same time, I began experimenting with Ruby On Rails during my spare time.

Every new function that I added to the VFP Com server required a time-consuming process:

1. Close Visual Studio;
2. Recompile the dll in VFP;
3. Restart Visual Studio;
4. Recreate the ASP.Net Interop dll:
5. Test everything;
6. Stop the production web server;
7. Install all the updated files
8. Restart the server.

It was tedious compared with the instantaneous updates that Ruby on Rails exhibited. I began looking for a simpler approach, a way to integrate a Rails-like approach with a Visual Foxpro backend. I was hoping to gain some of the same efficiencies of Rails in a VFP based web framework.

Fox Trails design goals

The new framework would need to achieve the following design goals for it to be successful:

1. Easy to use framework – no deeply nested object graphs.
2. Simple configuration – use meta data where available to eliminate configuration issues.
3. Easy to deploy – separate application logic from the COM interface layer.
4. Freely available – Fox Trails is public domain software.