Otto:
you asked great questions but before I give you my response let me give you my perspective.
I have one application that has been in the marketplace for 20 years. I'm not a developer I've only
the one application. It is sold to single users.
Presently competitiors have developed a web-based applications that I compete with.
Even though in my opinion a Web based application is no better than they single-user
application web based is the trend. We can develop beautiful, graphically enhanced applications but if the
user wants a web-based application the sale will be lost.
I believe there are two ways to provide a web-based application using fivewin. One is to have a stand alone
application on a server such as Citrix. Provide the user access through a website and they would have a
web-based application even though they are using a stand alone application on a Citrix type server.
To the user it would be Internet-based accessible from any computer anywhere. To the developer the only issue
would be getting it on an appropriate server at a reasonable cost.
You could literally carve out a number of folders on Citrix server and have the application provided
to many users with each user having access to their stand alone app in their folder on the server.
This might be a reasonable temporary solution to having web-based apps. I am investigating it for my program
but so far it is too expensive. Citrix which is an ideal server for this charges a monthly fee per user which
would drive the cost of my program significantly higher.
But we're still looking for a way to accomplish this.
The second method would be to have sufficient programming options to convert fivewin applications directly to
Internet-based applications. I can't say too much about this because I am not familiar enough with
web-based apps to have any idea how something like this might be accomplished.