To know more about FMP's fitness for the task, we'd need to hear more about the proposed application and user base. They may be good instances of FMP development, or they may not. That said, your customer is looking at apps written in FMP Pro, and you need to evaluate those apps on their own merit. I think Matt Haughton nailed it - for the right applications, FMP is simply the best choice going. It is not SQL-based, but does have ODBC and JDBC interfaces, as well as an XML/HTTP interface.Īs far as lock-in, FileMaker Inc has grown sales steadily, with very significant growth in new users who are attracted to the platform's solidity and ease of use. It's primarily client-server, though it has some very respectable web publishing capabilities which work well for many applications. :-)įileMaker Pro is a rapid app development tool. We actually employ many respectable developers who love using FMP. I'll admit to bias on this subject - I work with one of the larger FileMaker development shops out there, and have written the odd book on the subject. You can build rather complicated applications very quickly with it if your willing to deal with it's deficiencies. On the other hand, for a smaller organization in need of a customizable in-house database it could be a great boon. It's difficult to have multiple people developing on the same solution. In general I would say that if you're developing exclusively for the web or a large organization Filemaker Pro probably isn't the best fit. Layout design is fairly static and dated (this is improving with the Filemaker 12 and above).Requires the mouse to access functionality. Unable to copy and paste/import or export some items from solutions.Pretty much only drag and drop programming, you can only use predefined script steps, relationships are made by making a graph.The plugins required to extend functionality can be expensive as well.In addition the server part of the software is about $300-$800 a year Expensive compared to the free alternative: It costs about $100 per year for a local user, $150 per developer, if you are using it as a website you need specialized hosting, which tends to cost more.Inflexible: it does what it does well, but if you need more your out of luck for the most part.
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