As for me, I only have two suggestions to those planning the 2010 FileMaker Developer Conference:

1. Have the exhibit/dining hall at the center of conference, and
2. Record the conference sessions and sell them through iTunes

Layout Mode

This year, the conference was not well laid out physically, with the exhibitor/dining hall placed at the far end of the hotel, away from where any of the sessions were held. I do not know if rooms could have been rearranged differently, or if that was the best the hotel had to offer. I do know the conference felt separated from itself, and that attendance in the exhibitor hall was way down from previous years.

If FileMaker wants to provide a better conference experience next year, they will pick a conference center that can accommodate a large exhibitor/dining hall surrounded by conference rooms. This would give attendees a central place at the conference to regroup between sessions, network with other developers, and talk to exhibitors about their products.

The Conference on iTunes

But the number one thing that FileMaker can do next year, that would be beneficial to everyone on so many levels, is record the conference sessions and sell them on iTunes. Apple already does it for WWDC, so the business model should transfer nicely:

• Sell E-tickets to the conference alongside full conference passes. Offer a pre-conference price for them, and an option to buy individual development tracks, or the conference as a whole.
• After the conference, give each paid conference attendee, session presenter, and E-ticket holder an iTunes code for free downloads of all of the sessions.
• Continue to sell downloads of the conference until next year’s conference.
• Profit!

Some would argue that offering paid downloads of the sessions would lower conference attendance. While this may be true, lowering the cost of entry to the conference will allow more people to “attend” than ever before. I imagine the number of people buying E-tickets will more than make up for any decrease in attendance revenue. I also believe that a good percentage of those buying E-tickets would begin buying full conference passes in the years to come.

Conference attendees will benefit because they will be able to see any sessions they missed, or their favorite session again and again. To bolster attendance, FileMaker could keep the Keynote under NDA, and not offer it for download at all. Most conference attendees will agree that the real value of the FileMaker Developer Conference is interacting with other FileMaker developers between sessions and in the exhibit hall. However, there is something to be said for getting your money’s worth.

Thursday, August 13, 2009

• Jonathan Stark, jonathanstark.com, presented a pre-conference session called Intro to PHP. Seeing as how he wrote the book Web Publishing with PHP and FileMaker 9, he was more than qualified to explain constants and arrays to an intro class.

• The Keynote Session was held under a very threatening NDA. It was awesome. You should have totally been there.

Friday, August 14, 2009

• Matt Navarre, msnmedia.com, presented Extend and Optimize FileMaker Search, because he is Mr. FileMaker Search. Have you seen fmSearchResults? It uses one field and one layout to show the search results of multiple tables. It knows the data type (text, number, date, etc.) you are searching for, offers suggestions, and has an algorithm for ranking results. It is very, very fast.

  fmSearch results also uses the development technique I mentioned earlier, Virtual Lists. Basically, FileMaker data (from multiple tables) is stored in a global variable, and the global variable can then be parsed and referenced from an unstored calculation field or web viewer. Add some conditional and text formatting to make it really shine. Todd Geist has a more thorough explanation in his recap.

• Bill Heizer, Senior Consulting Engineer at FileMaker, presented Advanced Script Triggers. Need help remembering the difference between pre and post event script triggers? If the action that caused the trigger was Open, Enter, Modify or Load, OpEnLoMo, then you have yourself a post-event script trigger. Commits, Keystrokes, Reverts, Close, Saves, and Exists, CoKeRCSEx are pre-event script triggers.

Saturday, August 15, 2009

• Albert Harum-Alvarez, lead designer at SmallCo, presented The Idiom of FileMaker: What’s New, What’s Old, What’s New Again!. FileMaker has really matured over the years with the advance of portals, tabs, script parameters and variables, and Albert cautions developers against their overuse. He recommends against using table occurrences for search queries, creating gratuitous variables, and hard-coding business data and field names in scripts.

  But the biggest and simplest piece of advice I took from his session was, “Code as if the next developer on the project has an anger management problem and knows your home address. More advice can be downloaded from Albert’s website here.

• Geoff Coffey, co owner of Six Fried Rice, presented DRY FileMaker: Techniques to Keep Scripts Error-Free and Manageable. Follow this advice and you will stay ahead of the game:

  1. Do not build things that work, build things that do not fail. Planning for what can go wrong is more important than testing to see if something works.
  2. If you must fail, fail early. You do not want unpredictable code in the hands of a client that thinks it works.
  3. DRY, or Don’t Repeat Yourself. We create databases so users only need to enter a name once. We should apply that principle to how we create the database itself. Learning how to modularize scripts and code is the key.
  4. “We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.” – Donald Knuth, 1974. Stop doing it.

Sunday, August 16, 2009

• The best advice to come out of the Under the Hood session this year is as follows: When FileMaker loads a record, it loads all data from every field of that record (except container fields), even if a field is not on the layout. If you are storing large chunks of text in your database, but hardly ever using that field on a layout, your database may be running slower than it has to. Just move that field to its own table with a one-to-one relationship, and your database will run faster for layouts that do not use that field.

A big thanks to all who presented this year!

1. How was this year’s conference different from previous conferences?
2. What did I get out of the sessions?
3. How can next year’s conference be better?

As the title of this post may suggest, this post is about the major differences I saw at this year’s conference, and what effect, if any, they had on the overall experience.

Location, definitely not Kansas

This year the FileMaker Developer Conference was held in downtown San Francisco, a city with amazing food, culture, and public transportation. Usually the conference is held at a vacation-style resort, with 90+ temperatures and a lazy river, so the concrete jungle and temperatures that required layers was definitely different.

Weather and hotel amenities aside, some would argue that the urban setting enticed people to go off campus, and spend less time socializing with other attendees. That might be true for some, but I liked having the option of soaking up a little culture with my FileMaker, and I do not think I talked about FileMaker any more or less because of it.

Some would argue that San Francisco was an expensive place to hold a conference in this economic climate, but I did not feel like I spent any more or less than I did last year. In fact, as explained below, if you consider when the conference took place, it had the potential to be even more affordable than previous years.

Timeframe

The conference ran from Thursday, with pre-conference sessions in the morning and an early evening Keynote, through the closing sessions on Sunday afternoon.

I personally think this is much better than starting the pre-conference sessions on Sunday, holding the Keynote Monday morning, and ending the conference Wednesday afternoon. If we ignore the pre-conference sessions, which will always require you to get to the conference a day earlier, this year’s conference could have been attended in only two business days at the end of the week, compared to three business days at the beginning.

In a profession that could easily argue time is money, how can you argue with this schedule? I hope FileMaker has a Thursday through Sunday conference again next year.

FileMaker ran the show

And finally, for the first time I am aware of, FileMaker, not Advisor, ran the conference. From registration to the closing sessions it was FileMaker running the show. Why did FileMaker choose to do it themselves instead of outsourcing some of it Advisor? No idea, and I am not really concerned, because at the end of the day FileMaker did a good job. And from FileMaker’s perspective, who could argue with 1,100+ attendees?

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.