Hosted Solution Development

by Matt Petrowsky

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FileMaker seems like such an easy software solution. You simply craft your solution and open the file to start hosting it to peers on the same network. If you're wise, you use a copy of FileMaker server and take advantage of backups and server side scripts. This is especially important for your data, right? It's your data that's important. The user interface is simply a representation of that data.

Often, it's only when things start to bog down that attention is paid to performance and making things as optimized as possible. Fortunately, FileMaker client provides a very nice method for connecting to other FileMaker files - via the network.

The method of really taking advantage of client computing power is to put the Interface file there instead of on the server. Users are used to "updating" apps (even more so with the whole App Store thing). By putting the interface file on the client, you gain many advantages. A much faster perceived load time (since you can load any layout which does not show solution data until after a delay) and a number of operations which will run faster.

Your interface file can run as an Advanced stripped file and version enforcement can be managed via a script call to the Data file on FileMaker server. If simply reading this isn't exactly obvious, then watching this video should give you more insight into how the deployment model works.