I am an experienced professional filemaker developer (10 years),
although I have no experience with sharing a solution via php and
filemaker server advanced. I am seeking advice from people who do have
that experience to help me guide my client in deciding how we should
solve a problem. Thank you in advance for reading my lengthy
explanation and question.

I am the developer for a rather complex and mature system served by a
hosting company. My client is very happy with our system overall,
although there is one component (invoice creation) that is
frustratingly variable in it's speed. Sometimes it's just fine but
they report that there are times when it is very slow. We've
investigated this issue from a number of angles and so far have not
made any progress.

My client asked our hosting company (ODITech in the Seattle area) if
they had any ideas, and they suggested that using php rather than
filemaker client would be faster. My suspicion is that the person who
suggested that underestimated the complexity of our system, however my
client wants me to consider going in that direction. He is willing to
invest the time and expense in having me learn to develop via php IF
it seems likely that it will speed things up. As excited as I am to
learn a new skill set and be paid for it, I am skeptical.

As it stands, invoice creation in this system involves not just adding
line items, but running several scripts that operate on records in
several tables, field exit operations with script triggers, WSDL
triggering coordinated by a plugin, field validation, etc. etc.

So, assuming that theoretically I was able to ramp up and learn
everything I needed to properly deploy a fx.php solution, do you think
it really IS likely to operate faster than filemaker server/client,
given all of the behind the scenes events that would still need to
take place beyond the modification of fields and creation of records?


Any perspective is appreciated!

Thanks!

Greg <greg.dember (AT) gmail (DOT) com> wrote:

Filemaker Inc. says in the developer's essentials training series (or
whatever that ist called) that FMP-FMS traffic is more date intensive,
so CWP could get you more speed if the clients connects via the web.

However, you'd have to review carefully (or just rebuild) a lot of the
interface, especially the scripts, as not all script steps are web
compatible. They say that doing this might well take more time than
building the solution in the first place.

If your users, or most of them, are sitting the same office, you might
want to try a local server. Given the effort and the cost, it sounds
more reasonable to me to start looking at the local hardware.
--
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