MySQL AND Filemaker Pro?

Question

I have a client who wants to use Filemaker for several things in his office and maybe I need to create a web application.

The last time I used, thought or heard, Filemaker was about 10 years ago, and I seem to remember that I don't want to use it as the back of a complex web application, so I'm going to try to sell them in MySQL.

However, will their Filemaker database work with MySQL? Any idea what is the best way to get them down with Filemaker?

Answer 1

It may not be easy for you to talk about this from FileMaker, because it was a pretty clever tool for creating small internal database applications, and it had a very loyal user base. But you're right - this is not a very good tool for building a web application.

I had a similar problem with a client who was still using the dBase IV user application. Fortunately, the Perl CPAN archive has modules for communicating with anything. So I wrote a script that exported the entire dBase IV database every night, and uploaded it to MySQL as a set of read-only tables.

Unfortunately, this required MySQL in 30 minutes every night. (It was a large database, and we had to convert free-form text to HTML.) So, we switched to PostgreSQL and performed all the database updates as a single transaction.

But what if you need read and write access to the FileMaker database? In this case, you have several options, most of which are bad:

• Create a bi-directional synchronization tool .
• Get rid of FileMaker completely. If the FileMaker client databases are trivial, this can be relatively easy. I would start by writing a quick and dirty clone from their most important databases and showing it to them in a web browser.
• The client can actually be best served by a FileMaker-based web application. If so, it links to Google .

But how do you sell a customer of a particular choice? It is probably best to lay out the costs and benefits of each choice and let the client decide what is best for their business. You may lose your job, but you will maintain a reputation for honest advice and you will not participate in a project that is not well suited to your client.

Answer 2

We develop solutions with both FileMaker and PHP / MySQL. Our recommendation is to make the web application in technology optimized for web applications such as MySQL.

Having said that, FileMaker really has a reliable PHP API, so if your web application has relatively light requirements (for example, for home use), use it and save yourself the trouble of synchronization.

FileMaker ESS technology allows FileMaker to use SQL-db as a source of source data, which gives you 2 options:

• Use ESS as a good tough way to sync directly to FileMaker - this way you will have a “native” data source to work with FileMaker as such.

• Use ESS to let FileMaker be used as a tool for creating reports / data for searching / modifying data and editing directly in MySQL tables - it works sweetly.

We found that creating a complex application in FileMaker with an ESS / MySQL back-end is very difficult, so regardless of whether you choose 1 or 2 from the top, it depends on how complicated and difficult it is to use FileMaker.

Otherwise, SyncDek has a good reputation as a third-party synchronization automation solution.

Answer 3

I dealt with similar problems and found a couple of solutions that emk did not mention ...

• FileMaker can reference external SQL data sources (ESS), so you can use ODBC to connect to a MySQL database (or another) and exchange data. You can find more information here . we tried it and found it to be fairly slow to be honest
• Syncdek is a product that claims to allow data replication and data transfer between Filemaker, MySQL and other structured sources.
• You can use Filemaker Instant Web Publishing as a web service that your application can then push and retrieve data. We found a couple of wrappers for this in python and php
• you can put a trigger in the FileMaker database so that every time the record has been changed (or part of the record you are interested in), you can call a web service that updates the MySQL or memcached version of this data that your website can access.

I found that people like FileMaker, because it gives them a very visual interface for their data, it’s very simple to make fairly large standalone applications without too much knowledge about development. But when it comes to working with many users or presenting this data in a format other than FileMaker, we find that performance is a real problem.