FileMaker et al

I haven't written much about FileMaker lately, and I should, since it is still the most useful tool I have in my arsenal. I live in it almost every day. Together with a host of other technologies FileMaker is proving itself to be an extremely awesome platform to build a startup on. 

At DevCons past, Rich Columbre used to give a talk called something like "FileMaker at the Center". This is my version of that talk and I call it "FileMaker et al". Let me start with a little background information. 

First and foremost, I have changed jobs, and that has had a huge impact on my priorities. I spent years as a consultant, and or product developer. Now I am basically the IT Manager at high end custom photographer

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 and print shop.  Although I am using the same tools as I was before, the goal is entirely different.  As a consultant or product developer, my output was essentially "code".  That was my work product.  As an in house guy, my work product is the entire system.  The systems that I build and  that am responsible for have to work!  It quite frankly doesn't matter how good the code is if it doesn't work.

My company is a startup. That basically means that we are bobbing and weaving our way into our target market. We are changing all the time!  That also means that we are running tight and lean. We do not have a huge development staff.  We are constantly iterating.

The basic parameters of the project are as follows. Our public website is a large complex Flash application. Our customers use this application to custom design their own stuff, which we then manufacture and ship to them.  We have one manufacturing and photo processing facility in Salt Lake City. We have sales reps scattered across the country.  Our data center is also in Salt Lake although it is not currently in our manufacturing facility. 

So we are scatted all over the place and we have a pretty complex public facing web site. How do we build systems to handle all this?

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In a word, FileMaker! 

Of course there are lots of tools that would work technically.  But when you are not sure exactly what you are building because it changes all the time, you have a very small team, and you need it done fast.  FileMaker is tough to beat!

The first and biggest decision was to use MySQL as the database backend. We have a FIleMaker Server and a few FileMaker databases, but 95% of data is in MySQL.  This was almost a necessity since the Public website was Flash/PHP.  But we could have chosen to do some kind of syncing. But we decided instead to use FileMaker ESS.  I know that FileMaker Inc. says that you should not expect to build front ends for MySQL databases, but that is exactly what we did. So far it is working pretty well. I will leave the technical details of that part for another post.

All our back office systems, sales, customer service, manufacturing, and photo processing are built in FileMaker accessing MySQL through ESS.  The FileMaker interfaces were designed with remote access in mind, and to be sure, sometimes you have to build for that, but it has not presented any serious roadblocks.

We also make extensive use of PHP, even from our FileMaker based interfaces.  If there are any large transactional data manipulations to do, we do it in PHP and run it on the web server, using a sort of web services approach.  This works great!.  One transactional process that took a minute to process using FileMaker scripts takes less then 2 seconds now that it has been converted to PHP.

We also make use of the 3rd party tools and plug-ins.  Here is a list.

From 360works

• ScriptMaster - extremely powerful, useful for tons of stuff.
• SuperContainer - image storing

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From Seedcode

• FMSearchResult (matt Navarre) - search
• FMSpark (with Proof Group) - emailing

From Digitial Fusion

• Reactor - coolest #$%$^ interfaces you ever saw in FileMaker interface.

From New Millenium

• MediaManager - image manipulation

We have a great database in MySQL on the back end. We have have Flash/PHP and PHP web services running on the web server. Our back office interfaces are all built in FileMaker. Third party modules like FMSearch and FMSpark work just fine with ESS. Plug-ins fill in the gaps and open up a lot of possibilities. Reactor is seriously cool! I just love that I can embed rich interfaces into my FileMaker layouts. 

Quite frankly it is FileMaker that holds this all together.  FileMaker gives us the ability to rapidly iterate even with a small team. This is essential for a startup like ours.

I hope to look in detail at each of these pieces in the coming months, so stay tuned!