jsmall.us

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...

I have hosted a version of my FileMaker/PHP Hybrid demo solution on a publically available server. The FileMaker Pro part of it has the Admin account disabled, but you will be able to log in as a Staff user with account name " pclark " and password " pclark ". The web portion will allow you to to create your own account. FileMaker staff login fmnet:/shn.serveftp.net/PUSD_OE_Main Web user login http://shn.serveftp.net You can download a copy of all the demo files. I fixed a couple little bugs in the FileMaker files, and I included all the latest API patches in the current version of the download.

Okay, with my Devcon presentation behind me, and my summer vacation behind me (boo)… guess I better switch back on. For those who may have missed the significance of it, look again at Micah Woods' Smart Pill plugin for FileMaker announced just before Devcon. High on my to-do list? Figure out the coolest novel way to use this thing.

So, I planned a vacation for this week (the week immediately following FileMaker Devcon). All of my official Soliant work duties were pretty well covered, and I didn't receive any panic calls from the office or from any Soliant clients… enter the ghosts of freelance past. After (mercifully) not having had much "help desk" action all year from various and sundry family, friends and former clients, the week I'm on vacation I get "emergency" calls from a freebie website done years ago, three former customers, my sister, and a former colleague. In all but one case, there were two or more voicemail messages left on my business line, generally also accompanied by redundant messages on my cel and email. Only in that one case (thank you!) was my plea of being on vacation gracefully honored. In all other cases I basically got, "Yeah, that's nice. But what about ME?" The best laid plans… (how does that go again?)