FileMaker DevCon 2008 Post Mortem

It’s been a few weeks now since I returned from the FileMaker 2008 Developer Conference in Phoenix, Arizona. It was a whirlwind trip this time – there and back in 6 days with lots of jetlag and not much sleep, no thanks to Qantas for cancelling my return flight and delaying my departure. I’ve finally settled back in and can report on some of the highlights from the conference and the product showcase. I spent most of my time attending any PHP related sessions and learnt a lot about the power of PHP in conjunction with the FileMaker PHP API. I’m currently working on a project that is an upgrade from a CDML/FileMaker Unlimited 5 database driven site to a FileMaker Server 9/PHP driven site. There’s lots of new stuff to learn and I’m impressed with the capabilities of PHP compared to CDML. I particularly enjoyed Lance Hallberg’s sessions on the PHP API fundamentals and the advanced features.

The two sessions on using the Web Viewer to interact with your FileMaker tables and as a dynamic interface were both well attended. Both highlighted the power of the MBS plugin and the Fusion Reactor plugin – the amazing Fusion Reactor also won the FileMaker Excellence award for Solution of the Year. Congratulations to Craig and the gang at Digital Fusion for their amazing plugin which is one of the most truly innovative plugins to be released in the last few years.

In the product showcase I ended up buying some new tools and upgrades:

BaseElements 2 – Goya have released their update to v2 of their DDR Analysis tool BaseElements. This is almost a must have for the professional FileMaker Developer. I’m still using both Inspector and BaseElements as each have their strengths but spend most of my time with BaseElements. SixFriedRice were demoing an early released of a web hosted service – FM Lumen – which they promise will provide deeper and faster analysis of the FileMaker DDR. I can’t wait to give that one a try.

ClipManager – My FM Butler have released a beta of v3.0 of their handy tool Clip Manager which allows you to store and manipulate the contents of the FileMaker clipboard. It’s also at present one of the only ways to copy custom functions and you can use it to build up a library of fields, scripts, layouts and other elements that you can quickly add to your solutions. v3.0 is also the first release that runs on Windows as well as the Macintosh.

Web Services Plugin – I already have a developer licence for the amazing Web Services plugin from FM Nexus. This was featured in the opening keynote and FM Nexus released a beta of v2 which makes it easier to load functions on the fly by storing the WSDL file inside a field in your database.

I also bought the VTC PHP Training CD so I can totally immerse myself in the FileMaker API for PHP. I look forward to attending the next DevCon in 2009 in San Francisco – finally a new city and new new hotel!