FMS ODBC vs PHP API

[andrewschools]

Hello –

I have a question about FileMaker Custom Web Publishing performance.

My company has a fairly large application written in FileMaker. We have decided to port some of these features to the web. This app will be installed on our customer’s web servers.

I’ve only been using FileMaker for about 10 months but I’ve been using programming languages like PHP and ASP.NET for about 10 years. One of the things that come to mind right away is what version of FileMaker Server to use. I see Advanced allows ODBC which I like since I’m really confident in SQL. The other thing is performance. With FileMaker Server, instead of using ODBC, I see that the FileMaker PHP API is using a socket connection for each request and then returning the results in XML which I’m not the biggest fan of. I do not know how many concurrent users will be using this web based system but I’m planning on 50.

I plan on supporting both Apache 2+ and IIS 6+ servers. Maybe earlier versions of IIS but I haven’t looked into this yet. The biggest thing is PHP 5.3 support. These servers my run on Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7, Server 2003, 2008, 2010 and Mac operating systems. Security is a must as we are dealing with medical records, etc. All proprietary code will probably be encoded using the IonCube encoder.

With all of this in mind, can anyone give me advice or some benchmarking tests they have performed with the FileMaker PHP API?

I’m leaning towards FileMaker Server Advanced but many of our clients do NOT have Advanced just FileMaker Server so if they want these web based features, they would need to upgrade and some might not.

Thank you,

Andrew Schools

[Wim Decorte]

The question of benchmarking comes up often, but it virtually impossible to answer as the performance largely depends on the quality of the PHP/SQL code on the one hand and the structure and design of the filemaker solution on the other hand. Throw in different hardware and there are too many variables to consider.

There is also an ASP.NET connector in www.fmdotnet.org. That one uses the XML interface too so it can run on regular Server, doesn't need Server Advanced.