We are an auction house and use Filemaker as our business software. Hypothetically speaking, could Filemaker be wired to do an online auction on the web? Our system already contains all the info, but right now we use an outside company for our online auctions, and we have to keep manually updating our Filemaker files throughout the auction to reflect the action on their site. We would like to do our own, and if Filemaker is capable, it would be great.

It is theoretically possible. You would probably want to use FileMaker with something like Lasso to get the job done.

Chuck

What can Lasso do that Web Companion cannot? I keep seeing people suggesting Lasso but nobody can tell me how it's better in any significant way to Web Companion. Not enough to spend more money, not enough to bother buying and installing another product, not enough to have another vendor's support (or lack of) network to contend with.

So what can Lasso do that Web Companion cannot?

I just heard something from a "Filemaker EXPERT"(?) He said if we did the online auction, we would have to pay $200 per month to host it on a "Filemaker Compatible" ISP. What the heck is that? I pay that for a whole year of hosting with 500MB of space. Is this guy trying to take us for a ride or what? In the Filemaker Bible, I don't see anything about using some "special ISP" in order to publish to the web.

Your ISP will have to be running FMP in order to host your solution on their equipment. If you're running it off of your machine i.e. high speed full-time dedicated connection, and they simply provide the connection, then there isn't any special requirement.

If you're looking to have an ISP host your solution, there are a few of them out there. I'd recommend the one I'm using and they can probably beat that price:

[email protected]

[This message has been edited by dspires (edited December 08, 2000).]

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Originally posted by Vaughan:

So what can Lasso do that Web Companion cannot?

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I see two major benefits for using Lasso in a case like this. First, Lasso is multi-threaded, where as Web Companion is not. Although FileMaker is not multi-threaded and would be a bottleneck in this case, Lasso might be able to handle many functions without going to FileMaker while FileMaker is processing a request.

Second, Lasso supports the secure socket layer, which means that you can encrypt the information moving from the browser to the server. This would seem to be rather important in an auction site.

I find other benefits to Lasso over CDML in addition to these, although these two would seem to be the most important for this solution.

Check out this web site:

http://www.blueworld.com/blueworld/products/

It has some more information.

Comparing CDML to Lasso is kind of like comparing an Quadra to an iMac or a 486 to a Pentium III. Quadras and 486s can get the job done quite often, but if you need extra features, the iMac or the Pentium III has the advantage that it can do everything the less powerful computers can do and more.

Chuck

SSL and multi-threading... thanks Chuck for suggesting something tangible!