I am looking to replace MSoft Access with another development tool. FMP has been winning awards, its company support looks good, it has cross platform, etc, etc. So it seems like a good candidate on my short list (so is Alpha 5, but even more so VizFox Pro, or C#, but using the latter two means I'd miss out on leveraging the existing functionality built in to Alpha 5 and esp. FileMaker Pro. That means: it takes much longer to get to market!!) Access is definitely not on my list.
What I don't understand is how FMP developers can write robust applications w/o a programming language. I understand there is the Script. But can a script parse an ASCII file, do lookups on the contents, combine/delete/skip data depending on the lookup results, do leaps of string manipulation on further conditions, and write the row to a table? Well, probably you FMPers can do all that, but it would make more comfortable knowing that I could always fall back to code in a pinch. I have heard there is a plugin that incorporates a VizBasic_for_Applications language, but the FileMaker sales guy on the 800 line didn't know ANY THING about that. And I have to wonder why one has to obtain a variety of (3rd party) plugins for file access, string routines, and etc? Does FMP still have some programming holes?
---So: is there or ist that not language plugin for FMP? Or do I even need it? (Any futher comments regarding Alpha5 etc, also gratefully accepted.)
tia...
