Hello everyone,

I work for a small non-profit nutrition education institution in
Northern California. We currently use a fairly large and complex
Filemaker Pro database to manage most of our info on students and other
contacts. We have about 20,000 records, 15 or so active layouts (30 or
so total) and several hundred database fields, including about 15-20
calculated fields. We use this database over our LAN as well as hosted
to the outside world for remote use by our 2 other campuses.

We are soon to be embarking on a massive effort to move much of our
business online. As part of that process we would very much like to
sever our ties to running our own server for Filemaker, licensing
Filemaker (we will need to pay for a costly upgrade soon if we want to
expand to host more simultaneous users), and hopefully also end up with
a greater ability to integrate our database with other parts of our
business. We would like to work on automating a lot of things based on
database info and changes. This latter element is of greatest
importance - we will deal with licensing costs for any tool that really
facilirates our work flow.

To this end we are now looking at solutions for online databases and,
more importantly, database management and front-ends. I know SQL can
handle pretty much everything our Filemaker DB is doing as far as
back-end storage is concerned. What we need - and what I am not yet
aware of - is a replacement for the incredibly easy and powerful
Filemaker Pro front end database manager and layout system. We want to
be able to fully administer the database through a GUI, including
layout design and field/record creation and management. We would prefer
to avoid a custom-developed tool for cost reasons.

So basically what we need is Filemaker but web-based and using SQL as
the storage engine. This could be realized through any one of many
different ways, but I know of none yet that is really an adequate
solution. It may even be possible to make a local install of Filemaker
interact with a remote SQL DB and use Filemaker as the front end - that
would be great, but if that's possible to do well and seamlessly I'm
not aware of it. Preferably we would find a tool that basically allowed
everything Filemaker does, either totally online, or using a local
management tool that interacted with the remote DB (like Drupal, or is
it Plone?).

Is anyone aware of anything even remotely like this? If no such
application exists it seems like there's probably a good market for it!
I'll help fund development if someone wants to create it. Basically
combine an SQL management front end with a WYSIWYG web editor.

Note that I have had the following recommendations already:

Oracle Database and Oracle Application Express (APEX)
http://otn.oracle.com/xe
http://otn.oracle.com/apex

Servoy:
http://www.servoy.com/

I also found the following FMP->SQL interface tools, but I don't know
if any of them in any configuration would really do what we need:

http://www.profdata.nl/pdm/generic.jsp?taxonomy_id=5

http://www.fmpromigrator.com/

http://www.frontbase.fi/products/fbsql/index.php4


Note: A similar message has also been posted to the
comp.databases.filemakerpro group but I thought a more general audience
might have some good insight.


Thanks in advance for any help. This is quite important for our
company!

- Oshyan

tech (AT) baumancollege (DOT) org wrote:
consequently, it is difficult to suggest an alternative to Filemaker.
As I understand it, Filemaker Server already provides remote access
for Filemaker Clients so what is the advantage in changing databases?
Microsoft Access provides similar facilities to Filemaker and you can
use it to interact with any of the major relational databases but it
would require a complete rewrite of your applications for no apparent
advantage. I would normally assume that "web based" means that the
user uses a browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox to access the
application but your willingness to accept a local install of
Filemaker indicates that is not what you want. If your requirement is
simply to provide Internet access to a Filemaker Server from remote
Filemaker Clients then a Virtual Private Network seems like a much
cheaper solution.

Hi..

Have you considered open source alternatives - if not please take a
look here:
http://opensourcealternative.to/filemaker

And for open source databases look here for both mysql - and similar
open source datbases: http://www.osalt.com/mysql

I hope this helps you.

PS. I did notice that none of the filemaker alternatives allows
web-based access. But for a more complex solution that will support
this - check out: http://www.osalt.com/openlaszlo - this, however,
requires an application server of some kind capable of httpxml'ing
database operations.

best regards,
Anders Rasmussen
webmaster
Open Source Alternative - www.osalt.com

tech (AT) baumancollege (DOT) org wrote: