I am an experienced professional filemaker developer (10 years), although I have no experience with sharing a solution via php and filemaker server advanced. I am seeking advice from people who do have that experience to help me guide my client in deciding how we should solve a problem. Thank you in advance for reading my lengthy explanation and question.

I am the developer for a rather complex and mature system served by a hosting company. My client is very happy with our system overall, although there is one component (invoice creation) that is frustratingly variable in it's speed. Sometimes it's just fine but they report that there are times when it is very slow. We've investigated this issue from a number of angles and so far have not made any progress.

My client asked our hosting company (ODITech in the Seattle area) if they had any ideas, and they suggested that using php rather than filemaker client would be faster. My suspicion is that the person who suggested that underestimated the complexity of our system, however my client wants me to consider going in that direction. He is willing to invest the time and expense in having me learn to develop via php IF it seems likely that it will speed things up. As excited as I am to learn a new skill set and be paid for it, I am skeptical.

As it stands, invoice creation in this system involves not just adding line items, but running several scripts that operate on records in several tables, field exit operations with script triggers, WSDL triggering coordinated by a plugin, field validation, etc. etc.

So, assuming that theoretically I was able to ramp up and learn everything I needed to properly deploy a fx.php solution, do you think it really IS likely to operate faster than filemaker server/client, given all of the behind the scenes events that would still need to take place beyond the modification of fields and creation of records?

Any perspective is appreciated!

Thanks!

As your solution is externally hosted then you are subject to the upload speed of your internet connection. This of course will vary on demand and the reported occasional slow down might be due to higher bandwidth requirement from other applications.

I can't see a PHP based solution not suffering from the same problems, and you will lose a lot of native FM client capability.

Not sure why you're talking about fx.php rather than FileMaker's native PHP API.

At any rate, you may very well end up with a faster system, but you're going to have to basically build it from scratch. You won't have use of script triggers for one thing.

If you decide to not do PHP, maybe Citrix is worth a look.

Fitch -- I actually didn't even know the difference till you pointed it out. Thanks.

Also if you care about the differences, here is link that points to a white paper comparing the two.

http://www.fmforums.com/forum/showtopic.php?fid/50/tid/201306/

A variable is a means of storing a value, such as text string "Hello World!" or the integer value 4. A variable can then be reused throughout your code, instead of having to type out the actual value over and over again. In PHP you define a variable with the following form:

$variable_name = Value;

If you forget that dollar sign at the beginning, it will not work. This is a common mistake for new PHP programmers!

Note: Also, variable names are case-sensitive, so use the exact same capitalization when using a variable. The variables $a_number and $A_number are different variables in PHP's eyes.

a quick variable example

Say that we wanted to store the values that we talked about in the above paragraph. How would we go about doing this? We would first want to make a variable name and then set that equal to the value we want. See our example below for the correct way to do this.

PHP Code:

<?php

$hello = "Hello World!";

$a_number = 4;

$anotherNumber = 8;

?>

Note for programmers: PHP

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I will say only this... I have used FX.php in a production environment just once. I will never do it again. FX is just incredibly slow, especially when writing. These days, when I need PHP/Filemaker integration I accomplish it mainly by setting up MySQL servers and using the Actual Open Source Databases ODBC driver to create MySQL shadow tables in FileMaker. Both FileMaker and PHP can interact with MySQL with excellent speed, so it works well as a go-between.

For a system that is expected to handle a lot of concurrent users, I agree.

 

For a lot of systems built to handle smaller loads (which is really most Small-Medium Enterprises) then the extra expense and complexity is often not worth it.

 

I've done both, and will do so again...