Two quick comments...

[Fairlight]

At Wed, Feb 08, 2006 at 05:06:41PM -0700 or thereabouts, 
suspect Ken Cole was observed uttering:
> 
> It will be from the info I have seen/heard to date.  XML and sockets (in
> 5.6) gives you SOAP, SOAP gives you database connectivity probably
> greater than ODBC.

As a client-only node, that's great.  Yes, I know fP -can- be run
as a server, but the architecture of the language and events isn't
what I'd call elegant for or wholly conduscive to the task of writing
a concurrent-connection server.  Even if they added select(), the
architecture is still a poor match, IMHO.

I'm surmising that without some huge contortions of code, writing a full
concurrent-connection server is going to be at least slightly painful.
It'd also eat a user license permanently--although it'd be worth it.

So then if you're not up for those ramifications, you're in theory back to
client-only, which they have with ODBC.

But Bud hasn't even said whether fPXML is a separate product, a plug-in
module, or something to be rolled into 5.7 or 6.0 yet.  It's hard to hold
an educated debate about the merits when the facts aren't out in the open.
It's not like I didn't ask for details.

mark->