general question about plug ins

[Mark Appleby]

I have a general question about plugins. I am about to install the new file plugin from troi, but I can see a list of plugins being used into the future.

I am sure that the activator plugin would be useful.

a pop up calender would be more than useful once we go live on the next module of my system.

The dialog plugin will help for many day to day functions.

Finally I can see me using the an SQL plugin in the next year.

First of all will the use of so many plugins affect the performance of the system. (I can not help wondering why so many features were not put in by FM in the first place)

What are the best solutions for the above in order to have a trouble free life.

I look forwards to any comments.

[SteveB]

Although I've had only 5 or 6 plugins in use at any one time, I've never noticed any problems. I would doubt that even with twice the number you would have any problems (except maybe a little slower loading).

As to why FM hasn't included the functionality of some of the common plugins, I can give you a couple of guesses:

They would rather devote their efforts to new features like the DDR , XML, etc.

They don't want to step on the plugin developers and want to keep them around.

They're not very smart (FM that is): most of what they've done in the last 2+ years has been sloppy and incomplete.

[CobaltSky]

Merely by their presence, plug-ins do little other than take up a bit of disk space. The System/FileMaker Extensions folder is interrogated during load, but even with a couple of dozen plug-ins loaded the difference is not measurable (ie of the order of a second or less.

A slightly greater impact arises if your start-up script works through the list of installed plug-ins registering them (ie delivering license codes) - but even this contributes only very marginally to load time - a fraction of a second per plug-in, depending on the complexity of the registerinbg scripts.

There are then two other times when plug-ins impact performance.

One is when you are defining calculations and you select the external functions list. FileMaker interrogates each enabled plug-in in turn at this point to retrieve the list of available functions for display in the external function 'menu'. If there are a couple of dozen plug-ins loaded, this may take a second or two.

The other time when plug-ins have an impact is when your solution makes an external function call to one of them - at which point the performance impact is entirely dependent on the task at hand, the efficiency of your script and of the specific plug-in and function being referenced.

In all other respects, plug-ins lie dormant awaiting your pleasure, and do not intrude upon FileMaker (or a runtime) or your solution.

Provided they are registered with FMP (as most commercially available plug-ins are) and adhere to the development guidelines for the external function API, plug-ins don't interfere with one another either - each occupies its own 'space' from a programming perspective.