Monday, January 21, 2002

"Anyone interested in using Filemaker Pro on the web should really read this page on the Filemaker site. What I get from that page is kind of an admission that XML can work more efficiently than the 'cgi' style of interaction involved in products such as 'Lasso' , Frontier (non-xml) and the 'web companion' itself. They put it like this: XML makes a very lightweight envelope to hold data so it's fast to read and fast to write and I would heartlly agrees having had 6 years experience with FM on the web using all of the 'cgi' connectors above. [Greg Smith: Filemaker2Radio]" Yep. Actually, I'm building such an animal right now. I've got close to 1GB (yep, with a 'G') of Filemaker data deployed for my staff that I'm exposing to the web. I looked at the AS route (I'm quite adept at AS) but sucking down xml was just so much easier - and faster. Frontier (I'm using the full product) does a nice job of handling the xml, however Frontier doesn't always know how to easily work with serialized table data (the output of the xml.compile verb.) I've had to build in a fair amount of code to get everything working right. Even so, there's no question that the solutions I'm building work better than anything I could have built with Lasso or FM Web Companion directly. 11:31:31 PM

© Copyright 2002 Robert Cassidy.