in house use) then use that and save yourself the trouble of synchronisation.įileMaker's ESS technology let's FileMaker use an SQL db as the backend data source, which gives you 2 options:
Having said that, FileMaker does have a solid PHP API so if the web app has relatively lightweight demands (e.g. Our recommendation is to do the web app in a web app optimised technology like MySQL. We develop solutions with both FileMaker and PHP/MySQL. You might lose the job, but you'll maintain a reputation for honest advice, and you won't get involved in a project that's badly suited to your client. If so, refer them to Google.īut how do you sell the client on a given choice? It's probably best to lay out the costs and benefits of each choice, and let the client decide which is best for their business. The client may actually be best served by a FileMaker-based web application.I'd begin by writing a quick-and-dirty clone of their most important databases and demoing it to them in a web browser. If the client's FileMaker databases are trivial, this may be relatively easy.
Build a bi-directional synchronization tool.
(It was a big database, and we had to convert free-form text to HTML.) So we switched to PostgreSQL, and performed the entire database update as a single transaction.īut what if you need read-write access to the FileMaker database? In that case, you've got several choices, most of them bad: Unfortunately, this required taking MySQL down for 30 minutes every night. So I wrote a script that exported the entire dBase IV database every night, and uploaded it into MySQL as a set of read-only tables. Fortunately, Perl's CPAN archive has modules for talking to anything. I had a similar problem with a client who was still using a custom dBase IV application. But you're right-it's not a good tool for making a web application. You may have a hard time talking them out of FileMaker, because it was actually a pretty clever tool for making small, in-house database applications, and it had a very loyal user base.
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