Wirt after John, <original snipped> > A lot of people think that web-based internet transactions > are difficult to > program up, but as John explains here, they don't need to be. <rest snipped> It's not rocket science - a lot depends on the tool. As Michael Gueterman pointed out earlier -- and he turned me on to this tool... I will use Cold Fusion whenever possible. It handles state management for me, so I don't have to, and it does so quite nicely. Drawback: CF runs on NT and Unix. NT to the 3000 is quite speedy though. If you took the SIGIMAGE ballot last year, you actually used a Cold Fusion app, went through an NT box, to a 3000. (When it was launched, the NT box was in Washington State and the 3000 here on the East Coast - and people were STILL getting response times that were incredible). It's not a couple hundred dollars though (unless you get just the runtime version, where a developer wrote the application for you). There are plusses and minuses in both camps: Using an App server such as Cold Fusion gets your application up and running faster, and provides a lot of extras to boot. CGI (Perl, or even COBOL) provides everything on one box, but there are firewall considerations and so forth. Cheers, Joe