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Session materials from DC PHP

After being dark since August 4th, the Planet FileMaker aggregator-aggregator has the lights on again. It's not posted on the site anywhere, but based on the whois data and a bit of casual list-serve inquiry, it turns out that it is run out of Sydney by Mark Banks. Evidently, in a stroke of bad luck, no sooner did Mark Banks leave the country for 3 weeks (no doubt to attend DevCon, etc) than a router went down. Glad to see it back up, as I am an avid consumer of the Planet FileMaker uber-RSS feed.

I signed off my last post with this post-script: PS: Next I am going to make the same kind of thing to build a dataProvider object for Flex, so any insight relative to that appreciated. Well, as fate would have it, my idea to build a Flex/FileMaker connector dovetailed perfectly with Scott Love's vision to fully embrace Flex as a second featured technology for Soliant. How cool is that?! I love working for Soliant! (nb: Soliant is hiring .) Soliant has traditionally focused all sales and marketing efforts on the FileMaker niche. Other technologies have primarily served as extensions for FileMaker-centric solutions. After having carefully weighed the pros and cons, the Soliant brass concluded that both are fantastic RAD tools , backed by well funded, established companies, and, more importantly, Flex and FileMaker are not at risk of eclipsing each other. Presented with a new focus on Flex, Soliant clearly needed a solid, industrial-grade connector class to allow Flex to play nice FM

On Friday the 13th of April, I did a presentation of a complex FileMaker and Flash integration project I built. From previous experience presenting multi-technology integration projects to developers, I have come to realize that what people want is less of the Power Point, less of the gee-whiz demo files, and more of the practical cook book material. So on Thursday before the presentation, I put together a very simple Flash demo which contains all of the details on how to make Flash interact bi-directionally with FMSA, and not much else. The process got me thinking; it is so simple to understand the well documented FMSA CWP API and build command urls, and it is so simple to use the built-in XML() class in ActionScript 2 to slice and dice the xml FMSA returns, why are all the connectors which exist for interacting with FMSA so relatively complex? I have experience with FX.php , FMandPHP , and FileMakerPHP . For dot net integration with FMSA, there is Wim Decorte's FMdotNET . I a