Fox Geo is a program that I wrote that provides a zip code radius search using the Google Maps API. I borrowed the RenderVML utility from Fox Trails to generate the javascript for the embedded browser control.

The files are available at http://www.foxtrails.org/FoxGeo.zip or via subversion at http://www.foxtrails.org/svn/FoxTrails/contrib/FoxGeo

One of the strengths of Ruby is that it is extremely dynamic. You can actually change the definitions of the language at runtime. At typical example given is to change the definition of the ‘time’ class to add new features, such as now, yesterday, tomorrow, etc…

It would be entirely possible to build a Foxpro interpreter in Ruby. I will begin work on such a beast soon.

As I started working on this, I quickly ran into a few issues that I felt made this idea unfeasible:

1. First of all, I was unable to find a ruby gem that could write to Foxpro tables and database containers.
2. The second major issue was how to get acceptable performance out of an interpreter written in an interpreted language.
3. The sheer enormity of the task was rather daunting
4. Last of all, my skill at Ruby development is still rather limited

And to give credit where due, the graphics and design of the sandbox were provided by Emil Uzelac, a good friend and co-worker at Quotepro.

You can do this by adding <script type=”text/javascript” src=”<<webroot>>/lib/somefilename.js”></script> in your .vml template.

The parseJSON utility is a very rudimentary tool that will allow you to parse a simple json string into properties of a visual foxpro object. This can be useful for passing data from a web page to foxtrails using Ajax. Currently this utility does not support json with nested objects, arrays or collections.

parseJSON now supports nested objects.

These utilities do not have any Unit Tests yet.

When I created Fox Trails (known then as VFP on Rails), I asked Randy to take a look at it.

Randy was interested in using it for a Visual FoxExpress application that he was working on, and wanted to see if Fox Trails could access his VFE cursor objects. Here is a link to his original post about it. http://randyjean.blogspot.com/2007/04/exploring-vfp-on-rails.html

Maybe I’m just a nice guy, maybe I haven’t imbibed any gpl kool-aid recently, or perhaps it’s because I would like to see the product succeed . Truth is, I didn’t want to put any artificial limits on how the product could be used, and I didn’t want to deal with the issues required to produce a commercial product.

I think Fox Trails is a really cool web development framework and I wanted to provide a tool that foxpro developers could use in any way that they wanted to without any limitations.

This opens a number of alternatives as well, such as running Fox Trails from Linux or OS X servers running Apache and mono. Way cool.

The core functionality of the Default.aspx page is to simply instantiate the Fox Trails component and pass it the web request. Any web development language that can create a COM object can be used to invoke Fox Trails. You may find that you’ll need to add a query string to the first parameter of DispatchRequest if you are not using an ISAPI plugin. The first parameter should be the full url (plus the query string if needed) and the second parameter should be the url path of the page you are using to invoke Fox Trails.

For instance, given the url:
http://localhost/index.php/say/hello/world?sid=12345

You would invoke Fox Trails like this:
$dispatcher->DispatchRequest(”http://localhost/index.php/say/hello/world?sid=12345″, “/index.php”);

Index.php

< ?php

$dispatcher = new COM("demo.Dispatcher");
$dispatcher->AUTOCOMPILE = True;

if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == 'off') {
  $proto = 'http://';
} else {
  $proto = 'https://';
}
$host = $_SERVER["HTTP_HOST"];
$url = $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
$pathinfo = $_SERVER["PATH_INFO"];
$baseurl = $proto.$host.$url;

$output = array();
foreach($_POST as $key => $item )
{
$output[] = $key . '=' . urlencode($item);
}
foreach($_GET as $key => $item )
{
$output[] = $key . '=' . urlencode($item);
}

if (count($output) > 0) {
  $data = implode('&', $output);
  $querystring = '?' . $data;
} else {
  $querystring = '';
}

echo $dispatcher->DispatchRequest($baseurl.$pathinfo.$querystring, $url);
?>