OK let me if I can help.
If you own Server Advanced license and you have gotten a copy of FMS 8 then
you advanced license key will allow you to access the server via ODBC now.
You may find performance issues etc since you are essentially using the
current available drivers and the version of server that is currently
shipping.
When server advanced ships you may find all kind of improvements some of
which you may need to make a reliable connection especially on OsX.
So if I had a production environment I would not use FMP 8 server as it is
shipping to connect via ODBC.
You would be pretty much in unsupported territory since the actual advanced
product is not shipping yet.
As far as connecting to the client you could do that since 5 and you can
with 7. You are limited to 5 connections and it is a lot slower than
connecting to server and again you don't have the advantage of whatever
driver changes may come with server advanced release.
Hope that helps.
Dan
Thanks for replying. Unfortunately, it doesn't really help. I'm
interested in FileMaker Pro, not Advanced Server, and I don't care a
bean about performance or the five connection limit, because of the
context. Specifically, I have 100-200 students each term using
WiTango Lite and FileMaker Pro 6 to do course projects in a second
year computer literacy course. They work in pairs and build/test a
small web site. For pedagogical reasons, I want them to have to
launch and manage all the components (witangod, apache, filemaker)
themselves.
I'd like to switch to a later version of FileMaker because of the SQL
engine inside it, which allows for more general relationships between
tables (eg a=b AND c=d), and because FM 7/8 remove some of the
idiocies of earlier FileMaker versions (eg the absence of a Sort
script step with explicit operands, which is relevant in an
assignment).
As you point out, it seems to be those pesky drivers that are the
problem, though. I could connect the Witango Development Studio to
FileMaker 7 via JDBC, but couldn't do anything with the layouts once
I'd done so. Witango customer support told me that the difficulty
was being ironed out, and should be fixed "real soon now". As this
was in late August, I'm hoping its happened by now...
thanks,
john beatty
--
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School of Computer Science
University of Waterloo
200 University Avenue
Waterloo, Ontario
Canada N2L 3G1
+1 (519) 888-4567 x 4525 voice
+1 (519) 885-1208 fax
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