Building a Website with Filemaker Backend - can Filemaker cope?

[fumiyukibeppu]

Hi all,

 

many thanks for reading my post.

 

I am working on a project with my sister who currently builds our databases at work with filemaker. 

 

We are working on a website together for release in late 2014 or early 2015.

 

As with all websites, there's a frontend and a backend.

 

We would like to develop the backend "usernames, passwords, user data, dates, times, data fields etc" within a filemaker database (that my sister can build), and then have a professional web programmer build the frontend using javascript or html 5 or something similar. 

 

I have a few questions:

 

1) Is this a stupid path to go down factoring in growth and scalability? If, hypotheically the website grew to 1000's of people a day (I'm sure it wouldn't!) but, would a filemaker hosted (pointinspace.com etc) backend be able to cope with the large amount of information requests from a javascript web frontend in a speedy manner? ie, I wouldn't really wonder why the page took 10+ seconds to load?

 

2) As 99% of web hosts don't host filemaker files, we would have to split front end hosting and backend hosting between a normal host (bluehost, godaddy etc) for the frontend and a filemaker host (pointinspace.com, worldcloud.com etc) for the backend. Could that be a huge lag potential?

 

3) If we went down this path, how to the two connect? Is the best connection between a full website and filemaker database just PHP? or are other connection methods preffered from small strings of data (no images etc, just data fields). 

 

3) Should we just grow a pair, give up on FM and develop the backend in MySQL or something similar?

 

We are so close to starting the project, but I'm really struggling to find information on large scale websites that actually host the user data on a filemaker server backend, that get the speeds you would expect from a standard website.

 

Would love whatever help you could throw my way!

 

Many thanks,

 

Simon

[Sky Willmott]

One way to consider is using php and MySQL for the website, and using FileMaker as a back-end admin/management system by using the MySQL tables as External SQL Source connections in FileMaker, thereby enabling you to use FileMaker and MySQL tables in a very integrated way :-)

See http://www.filemaker.com/support/technologies/sql.html

[webko]

FileMaker does not scale well to the 1000's of requests a second level... single-threading, use of the XML engine to publish data and a different approach to web interactions are all part of that...

 

That said, a lot of websites never get close to that - http://apachescricket.com/ has been running directly off various FileMaker versions for over 10 years...

 

That site is on a web provider for front end, and a different database hoster for the backend... it works fine. Low load, but some complicated data behind it.

 

HTH

[trevix]

So...now is 2018 and a lot of water went under the bridge.

Would anyone with expertise update this discussion, please?

How would I go on building a web site for a travel agency, that uses FMS to manage all its business, where users can login and exchange data with the agency about an enrolled travel?

They tell me that ODBC/XML is not considered secure anymore.

Custom web publishing hosted by the agency hardware?

Thanks

Trevix