IWP or not IWP?

[stevie.at]

As a FM newbie I got some general IWP questions (and of course I browsed through the postings first...).

I'm redeveloping an existing database for my office to launch FM7 soon. The plan is to run the office-intranet on FM7 server (which is already in a box on my desk...still not opened) but as far as I got this, IWP needs FM7 server advanced (if ran from a server) that costs a little more...

So, if your boss asks you, is it worth to upgrade to the advanced version and use IWP, what would you anser???

[stevie.at]

As a FM newbie I got some general IWP questions (and of course I browsed through the postings first...).

I'm redeveloping an existing database for my office to launch FM7 soon. The plan is to run the office-intranet on FM7 server (which is already in a box on my desk...still not opened) but as far as I got this, IWP needs FM7 server advanced (if ran from a server) that costs a little more...

So, if your boss asks you, is it worth to upgrade to the advanced version and use IWP, what would you anser???

[Reed]

How many clients do you have, and where are they located? (on or off site)

If you have only a few users, you can get by w/o using server. FMP can serve 5 simultaneous sessions with IWP.

If you need server for other reasons, you could consider the price difference between server and server advanced. $999->$2499. That difference buys you 5 client licenses. (no VLA discounts assumed)

If all your users are on site, then you may want to get plain server and use FMP clients. (This will give you more flexibility to build a richer client interface) But if many of your users will be accessing the server over a WAN, then a FMP client may not have the performance you want. (It's pretty good but not great) Then IWP will have better network performance, but you are more limited in what kind of scripting you can do vs. FMP clients.

If you will have a lot of simultaneous users, and the IWP interface is sufficient for your needs, then you can just buy FMSA and no FMP client licenses and you'll have 100 users for $2499.

Don't forget that you also get a lot more than just IWP with server advanced. You also get custom web publishing, which allows you to integrate with other websites using XML, XSLT, PHP, or Lasso. You can also access FMP data using ODBC or JDBC. Using custom web publishing you can scale to many more than 100 clients (You just have to learn to use one of the above technologies)

Myself, I'm still using FMP as a host for my own lab, since I don't need more than 5 IWP and 5 FMP clients. (I've set up server for others who need to use it) My host machine is still treated as a server, as it's not used for other tasks, and I've set up a couple of cron jobs (One that uses applescript to schedule a live backup of the database, and one that copies and creates timestamped archives to external locations.) So it's like having server, without the capacity, or the remote admin.

Hope this rambling reply answers some of your questions,

Dana

[Reed]

How many clients do you have, and where are they located? (on or off site)

If you have only a few users, you can get by w/o using server. FMP can serve 5 simultaneous sessions with IWP.

If you need server for other reasons, you could consider the price difference between server and server advanced. $999->$2499. That difference buys you 5 client licenses. (no VLA discounts assumed)

If all your users are on site, then you may want to get plain server and use FMP clients. (This will give you more flexibility to build a richer client interface) But if many of your users will be accessing the server over a WAN, then a FMP client may not have the performance you want. (It's pretty good but not great) Then IWP will have better network performance, but you are more limited in what kind of scripting you can do vs. FMP clients.

If you will have a lot of simultaneous users, and the IWP interface is sufficient for your needs, then you can just buy FMSA and no FMP client licenses and you'll have 100 users for $2499.

Don't forget that you also get a lot more than just IWP with server advanced. You also get custom web publishing, which allows you to integrate with other websites using XML, XSLT, PHP, or Lasso. You can also access FMP data using ODBC or JDBC. Using custom web publishing you can scale to many more than 100 clients (You just have to learn to use one of the above technologies)

Myself, I'm still using FMP as a host for my own lab, since I don't need more than 5 IWP and 5 FMP clients. (I've set up server for others who need to use it) My host machine is still treated as a server, as it's not used for other tasks, and I've set up a couple of cron jobs (One that uses applescript to schedule a live backup of the database, and one that copies and creates timestamped archives to external locations.) So it's like having server, without the capacity, or the remote admin.

Hope this rambling reply answers some of your questions,

Dana

[Steve T.]

Howdy, s! I've been itching to try out IWP but haven't found a good candidate project yet.. most of what I've done has to do with Custom Web Publishing with the now-defunct CDML. Nevertheless, depending upon how you answer Reed's Q's about how many folks and where they're located, the "best" way would probably be to user FM7Server with each client having his/her own copy of FM as suggested. Web access is great, but I think it would be too restrictive for most of my users. Plus, we tend to make tight layouts designed for printing which can be problematic for the web.

Now, having said that, I think IWP can be a perfect fit for some uses. As Reed mentions and has demonstrated before, even FMP-client can be awesome and work in office/lab situations. Reed is also one of the few folks I know of whose dabbled in several of the various FM-related technologies so has a good overall understanding of what's involved. FM7ServerAdvanced is more for public or large-scale web publishing, and if you plan on running both Server and Server Advanced, don't forget to factor in additional hardware costs since it is generally recommended that you not run Server and Server Advanced from the same mahcine, although some folks do.

Now, if its a web-only kinda thing, I'd probably recommend skipping FM altogether and use a PHP/MySQL or PHP/PostgreSQL solution if you have access to some programmers/coders. I've had better stability and performance with these technologies but I HATE having to get that info into FM for user-type stuff, so try do so only for web stuff. Any combinations and I'd probably prefer FM.

GTG.. good luck!

--ST

[Reed]

I wouldn't say that I know much about custom web publishing, I've just used the dev. license for server advanced to learn about what I can use it for if I need it. So far I've been so pleased with the new IWP, that I haven't needed anything else.

Like Steve T. said, there are many other ways to do things if you're looking to make an all-web solution, but if you want both a rich client-server app and a web app, that's where filemaker shines. I've been messing around with MySQL a bit, and looking into using RealBasic to create a client application and PHP for the web. There's definitely a lot steeper learning curve going down that path compared to FM. That doesn't mean I'm not going to give it a try, but I'm not going to migrate my working FM systems to something else until I get something better/faster/cheaper/etc. I looked into 4D a little bit too, but decided that it wasn't any easier to learn than RealBasic/MySQL, and the licensing costs were much more expensive.