I am writing a web app to complement the functionality of my web site, but in doing so I am trying to keep the app load time down to a very minimum. The app will display a catalogue of pictures, options, details and prices. There are about a hundred items in the catalogue. So finally here are my questions; Is it best to store pictures and descriptive text within the app or in a separate file? I know that the answer may seem obvious, but I thought that Xojo may have some hi-tech way of encoding picture files and text in a compiled app
Why wouldn’t you use an separate SQLite database file with TEXT and BLOB fields? When you go to display a picture perform a SELECT statement to retrieve it, save it to a cache folder on the server, then show it in an HTMLViewer.URL.
I would keep the images on the server and let apache serve them to a WebImageView. Let apache do what it does best 
The texts could be stored in a database and connected to the images with the image name or something.
Keep the images separate and let the web server (Apache or IIS) serve the pictures for you.
Putting them directly in the app will mean that they all need to be loaded every time the app launches, even if they are never seen. But even putting them in the database has high costs because you have to retrieve the binary data and send it to the client, all while serving requests for browsers. This is one function Thats easy to offload to the web server because it already knows how to do that.