About 5 years ago I wrote a desktop application that we use to do invoicing and maintain customer information. The program is written in Visual Foxpro.

Unfortunately, Visual Foxpro doesn't have a web option, so we wrote a program in Alpha Five that handles the web part of this application. Alpha Five provides the back database for online ordering and customer maintenance.

The problem with this app is that we had to create a sync system that would keep the data synchronized between the desktop Visual Foxpro tables and the web Alpha Five tables.

What I would like to do is write a solution in Filemaker that would allow us to do both. Access the files from the desktop as well as allow our users to access the data from a web solution. The question is, can we do this with Filemaker? I've already created some solutions with the desktop so I know it can handle that. I don't think IWP would provide enough possible connections, so using PHP and the Filemaker API is probably the only option. Can one set of files hosted on Filemaker Advanced Server be accessed by both a web and desktop solution?

Yes, all is possible in FM. You can even have the some of the tables in mySQL and use Filemaker's ESS capabilities.

I'd start with reading the white papers on CWP.

Thank you for the suggestion Barbara.

Not to drive you away from Filemaker, but it's hard to believe Alpha Five cannot produce a desktop application to access its served database - same way Filemaker can.