Tuesday, 22 January 2002

Looks like quite a few people might be interested in working with Filemaker Pro and Radio. Thanks for the 'Scripting News' link Dave. Sure bumped up the traffic! Two quick points for this post: 1. I wish Radio's 'stories' feature worked better. I'd love to use it to organise my thoughts and provide more considered documentation. I know others have made the same point and I guess it'll come. 2. I'm in the middle of my attempt at a Radio 8 Tool. I'm calling it FMRadio and hopefully it will help to set interested Radio users up with a very effective 'client' for Filemaker Pro files served through the 'web companion' plug-in. Stay tuned. 7:08:23 PM

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. 12:02:32 PM

The really good thing about using 'Usertalk' varbs (eg. xml.compile) to process the XML output of Filemaker Pro files on the web is that a single utility script can be used to create html tables for all FM databases irrespective of the field names, field types or even number of fields in each instance. This means that any new FM databases can be setup for the web quite quickly. All that needs to be done is for the utility Frontier/Radio script to be pointed at the correct server, port and new file( with 'web companion' turned on) and Bingo the new records should show up on the web page nicely presented in a table as a fully integrated page within the general website. Relational data including borrowed pop-up lists and portals can also be handled in this way. 11:49:14 AM

© Copyright 2002 Greg Smith.