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OK I’m mostly recovered so let me try to answer some of the questions regarding FileMaker 7. A little background 1st. 50% of my business is FileMaker work. I have been working with the product since version 2.0.
I have used version 4.0 to build a backend to a large website several years ago and that was only because the owner of the company had built his in house application that way. I have never been a fan of using FMP as a backend to Witango sites because it is single threaded and could not access the server. So in most cases making a really robust site required you to load a lot of stuff into domain scope variables and manipulate arrays.
That said as far as building in house systems of WAN systems nothing comes close to even FMP 6 in the ability for rapid application development and the ability create slick users interfaces. There is a large developer community in the thousands. There are 14,000 licenses in NIH. If you check the client list on their web site you will see it is really impressive.
It is the top selling database in its market space outselling Access and any other competing product.
So much has changed with FileMaker 7 that it makes sense for anyone who has not looked at it in a few years to re-visit the program. It is a tool that provides a rapid application development environment and now offers many of the features of higher end systems.
The whole file format has changed as well as the calculation engine and code base. That said they have still managed to build a conversion tool that makes it 98% backward compatible with FMP 5 and 6 solutions.
FileMaker had always been file based in the past, one file equals one table. Multiple flies equal one database. All scripts, fields, layouts were tied to one file. This caused multiple issues that all had work around, but slowed performance and increased development time.
FM7 supports a table based file structure. You can now have multiple tables in one file while still referencing tables in an external file. This enables you to have an interface file which holds all you look and feel and scripts while you have a second file that has multiple tables that hold all the data. The interface file would old have table references no tables of its own. For a developer this means changes to the solution could be accomplished by delivering a new interface file and never having to touch the data itself. Much like we do by delivering a new set of taf files.
The new structure allows for more SQL like queries and with FMP interface abilities you can deliver some very slick reports and user functions in minutes that might take hours in other programs. For instance displaying a day, week, month calendar on one layout (page) and have that change based on which employee record you are on or what project you are looking at.
The new calculation engine looks like it might have been licensed from mathematica or someone like that. It is accurate to 400 places left or right. Does factorials and lots more probability math. The cool thing is in FM7 you can do this with just a few lines of code.
The developer version lets you build custom functions that you can call from anywhere in the database.
You can control text formatting based on dynamic data criteria.
You can finally due recursion within calculations and scripts.
Speaking of calculations this has been a FMP strong point that just got stronger. A calculation filed is one that is based on as much logic as you want to put into it. It can also return text, date, number, time, or container.
A container field can hold many types of data graphic, text, PDF etc.
Security to conform to industry standards and is now easy to manage and extremely difficult to break.
There is much more and if you are interested I would suggest visiting their site, downloading the 30 day demo and reading the white papers.
How do I think this will affect Witango community?
Dan Digital Software Solutions
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