FileMaker DevCon 2008 Recap

Posted on July 20, 2008 by Michael Gaslowitz

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I want to use this post to share with you a few of the amazing presenters and sessions I attended at FileMaker DevCon 2008 in Phoenix, AZ. Please note that while I did attend 12 sessions, I am only listing the ones that really opened my eyes. I learned so much over the course of three days that I am excited beyond words, and I have not been able to stop talking about the great things that are going to happen with FileMaker. I know I am not the only one.

Monday, July 14, 2008

Craig Saunders, CEO of Digital Fusion Ltd, presented How to Design Super Cool User Interfaces Using the Web Viewer, and the power of their Fusion Reactor plugin blew us away. Simply, this plugin allows you to communicate with your database through FileMaker’s web viewer. You can embed and run FileMaker scripts, filter portals, and create sliders, buttons, and pop-up fields that grab data from FileMaker fields and value lists. Some web voodoo might be required (HTML, CSS, Javascript), but there are several built-in functions (like buttons and sliders) that are dead simple to use. Licensing is very affordable, especially if you are going to bundle it into a commercial solution. Check out the demo today.
Steve Lane, vice president of Soliant Consulting, presented Basics of Software Development Lifecycles, and for a developer just starting out on his own, this was an invaluable session to me. He touched on the five basic parts of software development: (1) requirements, (2) design, (3) development, (4) testing, and (5) deployment, and the different ways and combinations these could be applied: namely staged, spiral, and agile. A simple project with few requirements and a straight-forward design might be done quickly through a staged development approach, whereas if you are trying to build complicated workflows into your solution, where plenty of user testing is needed, more of an agile approach might be required.

If you are dealing with clients who neither wish to provide requirements upfront, or view intermediary progress, it was recommended to explain to the client that they just might not be ready for this database, or that it would be beneficial to have access to someone in the organization who can commit time to this project. For reconstructing a damaged database with functional enhancements and architectural redesigns, hope your client trusts you because depending on the complexity of the solution, it is going to take a long time.

Steve also recommended two books for your enjoyment: Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art (Best Practices (Microsoft)) by Steve McConnal, and Agile Estimating and Planning (Robert C. Martin Series) by Mike Cohn.

Tuesday, July 15, 2008

Christopher Gauthier, senior applications developer at Greenpages Inc., presented Document Management Integration Using Microsoft SharePoint and the Google Mini. The demo with SharePoint was interesting. It allows your organization to share just about anything across groups like Apple’s Wiki Server, and even for those who are technologically adverse, configuration and usability seemed fairly straightforward. Still, SharePoint is expensive, hard to customize on the back-end, and of course, Windows only.

The Google Mini on the other is an amazing piece of hardware, and it is just like having Google for your very own use. Starting at $3,000 for 50,000 documents (up to $10,000 for 300,000 documents), it will index almost anything you throw at it: internal/external websites, local file servers, and thanks to the FileMaker API for PHP, your databases too. All you need to do is put your contacts/projects/documents/etc. table into PHP so it is web-accessible, have the Google Mini crawl and index the page, setup the search interface of the Google Mini in a web viewer, then use the Reactor plugin to access your results. For larger collections there is the Google Search Appliance which starts at $40,000, and can index up to 30,000,000 documents. I may never need to create a search script or layout in FileMaker again.
Todd Geist, founder of geist interactive, presented Extend FileMaker Pro Web Viewer Functionality, and the file he posted on his blog is going to make working with the web viewer a whole lot easier. Todd went and wrote a bunch of really ingenious custom functions, and when combined with the mbs plugin, all we need to do is write in a slightly stylized form of html, and his work will embed javascript libraries and escape out, or put in, all the necessary quotation marks for the web viewer to render properly. What are you going to do with all of the development time you saved?
Lance Hallberg, owner of FM Synergy, presented FileMaker API for PHP Advanced Techniques. Did you know you can execute PHP scripts from the Import Records script step? Nothing gets imported, and as long as you catch for errors it will not yell at you. You can also run PHP scripts from the command line, and schedule these scripts to run from FileMaker Server. Be sure to check out Lance’s Javascript class LAJAX Class, especially if you are interested in calling external web pages and returning the results into Javascript functions.

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Todd Geist, founder of geist interactive, returned and presented a session and a workshop back-to-back on Database Transactions. Think of a transaction as a single interaction with a database. Opening a record, making an edit, and closing the record is a transaction. Cycling through a portal and updating fields in each related record is also a transaction. The important thing to remember is that the whole transaction must be completed without any errors, and if there is an error at some point, everything completed prior to the error should be undone. If you are looping through 10,000 (accounts receivable) records, you need to know if there was an error with one of the records because you cannot have some data that is right and some data that is wrong. Through a combination of manually saving layout data with the Commit Records script step, and some thought out script design with and without error capturing, reliable and accurate data can be achieved. 3/3 on Todd’s presentations FTW.

Thanks again to everyone for a fantastic conference. See you all next year.