Extensitech's xBase version 3 now available!

[Chris Cain]

Extensitech is pleased to announce the release of xBase version 3. xBase is our freely available starter solution. It is free for both personal and business use.

Extensitech builds custom FileMaker solutions for clients in many industries, so each of our solutions ends up being customized to the clients' needs. However, we also realize that there are certain elements common to a robust solution for any business or industry. xBase includes tools for relationship management, such as people, companies and contact information, activity management and calendar features, and administrative tools for setting up the client's own organization, employees and user accounts.

More importantly, though, xBase makes development quicker and easier, with extensible conventions and re-usable layouts, scripts and more.

Extensitech has been using xBase as the foundation for all new solution development for about 4 years now. It has made our solutions quicker and easier to develop and enhance, and resulted in happy clients. You can read more about those clients, and what we did for them, on the Case Studies section of our web site. Many of those solutions would have taken many times as long to develop, and would not have been as robust, if we did not have this valuable tool at our disposal. Many features, already included in xBase, would have been too costly and time-consuming to fit into the budget of any one project.

For those of you already familiar with xBase, version 3 includes a number of enhancements. The look and feel is much improved. The underlying database structure uses a modified version of anchor-buoy to reduce TO proliferation and allow for more copying and pasting of layout elements. The naming convention has been altered slightly so that the most commonly used fields (namely, keys) show at the top of alphabetical lists. There are many more enhancements, too numerous to list here.

Perhaps the single best enhancement, though, is the introduction of xScript. This single script accepts complex parameters for finding, selecting, updating, deleting, printing and more, so that in most cases, you can call xScript and write a detailed parameter, rather than having to create custom scripts for each layout. As evidence of this, xBase v3 has only about one sixth the number of scripts that were required in v2.

Go ahead and download your free copy today, and be sure to download the developer documentation as well. Use it as you see fit. Use it as it is, build on it, or even modify it however you like to encompass your own conventions and preferences. Even better, share your experiences with us so that we can continue to make xBase better. You can contact us via the website, or by calling 813.426.3366, to get a walk-through, discuss the features, or to discuss having us customize a solution for you. Of course we'd like to hear from prospective clients, but we're also interested in collaborating with other developers like you, to improve xBase, or help you use xBase to get a "leg up" on your own development projects.

While you're downloading your free copy of xBase, be sure to check out our new logo and our new website design. Many thanks to Andy Gaunt of DnGDesign (www.dng-inc.com) and Jason Zipperer of zippweb (www.zippweb.com) , for giving our logo and site (respectively) a much-needed facelift!

[Ocean West]

Chris Excellent :

Just curious what is the login credentials, I missed that somewhere?