IWP is it worth looking at?

[aholtzapfel]

I maintain a solution for about 35 users, but the company is growing and many new users our now in remote locations. Many of thier needs are small but they still need access to the information within filemaker. Given the cost of licences for fm, maintaining a vpn, terminal services, .... I would be neglegent if I didn't a look at alternatives. One of those is the IWP feature. (Last time I gave it a serious look was in version 5, recently I had a look and it has come a long way)

My questions are: what are the drawbacks, how stable is it, What kind of solutions have been successfully served this way, and what are the pitfalls to watch for.

(I ask this here becuase I'm fairly certain I could create a file from scratch that would work but I don't know what would be involed doing this to a large legecy solution)

[Genx]

Its stable, but its kind of slow. It works quite well for what it is, but I would suggest you develop layouts specifically for IWP.

[Genx]

Oh some stuff to take into consideration..

Open up script maker and check the thing that says indicate web compatibility - anything that is grayed out can't be used in IWP.

Ummmm, also yeh, the fields look kind of ugly when you click in them so they'll have to be big.

That's about all i can think of at the moment.

Depending on how basic your tasks really are, you may want to take a look at CWP with php instead.

[Larsal]

We've used IWP for the last year. I can tell you that the fields don't line up as nicely as they do on the client. Also, they operate differently as well, including drop down menus, etc. I was told Dreamweaver or PHP is the way to go.

[Genx]

Dreamweaver AND PHP is the way to go (you write php in Dreamweaver ).

There are some open source editors out there that aren't half bad though... and of course there is the php site assistant.

[truthiness]

There's no simple answer as it all depends on your goals & objectives. You could go PHP (or ruby, asp, jsp,...or maybe servoy) but remember there's a big learning curve regardless of which of these technologies you choose.

There's some nice web 2.0 online databases like Zoho Creator (my fav), or dabble db & more. But the quickest, most pain free way to deploy a FMP solution is to go with IWP. It works very well for small workgroups.

Good luck!

[Tori Mitchell]

What's more, with IWP as with ALL web-publishing, your scripts and layouts, as Genx said, are definately going to have to be retooled to the IWP interface.

IWP is fine and well but I've found that every time that I deploy it, I have to make a seperate interface file for the solution that I'm working on simply to make sure that everything that I'm looking at is web-safe. This gets into some serious project management issues when you want to deploy new functionality to your solutions as now you have two places to implement the functionality in different ways. *ugh*

PHP/Ruby/Whatever CWP is really quite nice and is somewhat more flexible as you can shortcut some of the things missing from the FM client via those technologies however, as has been said, that's a significant learning curve while IWP is basically a dumbed-down version of the FMP feature set.

Edited August 14, 2007 by Guest
typos

[aholtzapfel]

Thank you all for your responses.

My "gut" tells me that IWP would do everything that I need it to but that the performence would be poor and my many users would not like it.

I will have a look at the php site assisstant and "play" with IWP a little more.

[LelandLong]

This thread was posted in an incorrect category. It has been moved to this category by a forum moderator.

From: FMP Developers & User Groups - In House Developers

To: Publishing FileMaker Online - Instant Web Publishing

[bl]

I have a fairly simple multi-file solution and would like to navigate between layouts in 2 files. Does IWP support this? So far, I havent been able to get it to work.

I was wondering if it can even be done.

TIA,

[Paul Bravo]

Can i help me.... i made a form in fm 5.5, and i share by iwp, without any problem, i buy the 9 version and migrate but i cannot display the drop list, with the 9 version, i have 9 field with drop list connected to a fm file each one, like occupation, state etc..anyone know what is the problem....i need help and i