FileMaker DevCon wrapup

p. There is a danger for programmers that we put on the blinders of “the latest cool”. The old adage of “When all you have is a hammer…” has never been more true. We see people trying to force old technology to do new things and visa versa. Somewhere along the Information Superhighway (hey, it’s been a long time since I’ve use that one!) we tossed out the concept of “right tool for the job” like a half-empty Big Gulp.

p. So when I arrived in Orlando, I will admit to a bit of a condescending attitude. After all, what possible solution could FileMaker offer to a problem that I couldn’t solve by stitching together the Zend Framework and a couple of JavaScript libraries? I now know that I was wide of the mark. Those of us who do web and only web sometimes think that everything can be solved via the web. However, if a web based application costs your client two or even three times what it’s desktop cousin would have cost, have you really gained anything?

p. FileMaker is a focused application. They do not try to compete with large scale databases. They know what their app is good for and try to make it the best in the market. They are excellent in supporting their developer community and the avoid the “creeping featurism” of lot of applications by not adding new features just to round out a release.

p. I saw a lot of interesting sessions at the conference. The one that shocked me the most was the “Under The Hood” sessions. In them, the programmers actually writing FileMaker were on-stage answering questions from the audience. I’ve been to a lot of conferences in my days, most of them like the FileMaker DevCon, sponsored by a closed source company. This session was a breath of fresh air because there wasn’t a lot of “I’m not allowed to talk about that” or dancing around the product’s warts. Developers asked, developers answered. In the open source world, we take this direct interaction for granted. I am glad to see FileMaker championing this in the closed source world.

p. I’ve mentioned other sessions in previous posts and I won’t re-hash them here. This conference had a heavy concentration of “FileMaker and the Web” and it’s obvious that FileMaker understands that the web has a place. I just hope that other web developers can grasp that tools like FileMaker and applications built on the desktop are still important.

p. It was my sincere, but misguided, opinion that I was invited to speak to “welcome” the FileMaker community into the PHP community. I was totally blown away by the fact that FileMaker developers had been using “FX.php”:http://www.iviking.org/FX.php/ to connect FileMaker databases to the web for several years now. I guess it’s a testament to the diversity of PHP that our community is now so large that there are the SIGs that are a part of us that some never know exists. Now that FileMaker is producing an officially “supported API”:http://filemaker.com/developers/resources/php/index.html, I really expect this group to grow larger and more visible within the overall PHP community.

p. So I’d like to wrap-up by saying thank you to all of you for a great 3 days. I’d like to say thank you to people like Lance, Eric, Bob and, of-course, Mary. You all took the time to talk to me and make me feel welcome and I sincerely appreciate that. I hope I will see you all again next year.

p. That’s it for this year’s FileMaker DevCon wrap-up.

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