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FileMaker flies under the radar and most people haven't even heard of it. It seems like it was neglected over the years as well. They also took some strategic d
by TheCowboy 5y ago
FileMaker flies under the radar and most people haven't even heard of it. It seems like it was neglected over the years as well. They also took some strategic directions that weakened the utility such as lack of interoperability, but it seems like they've improved.
The only reason I even know it exists is because I was brought in to one company to try to untangle a mess of business logic and UIs that had accumulated into an insane mountain of technical debt.
That said, I do appreciate what it is trying to do and the power it gives users. There are a lot of niche products trying to "reinvent" aspects of FileMaker, but no real general replacement exists that I'm aware of.
- cestith 5y agoI've worked places where the main app driving the business office was written in A5 or FileMaker Pro. One was an ISP that ran ISP management from some ISV and it charged us per maximum active subscriptions. I forget the name. I made a decent chunk of my living for a time taking custom small business apps in QuickBasic or similar systems and plugging them into a graphical interface. My method was sometimes more complex, but often it was translating to OOBasic and using Open Office forms for the interface. One could get auto-saved updates white a database breaking it, and even trigger an update in the UI if someone changed data in the DB from another connection. It's not surprising someone else thought of such a system. It's just surprising they don't acknowledge any awareness of existing solutions. Our industry is often blind to its own history which is fairly said since we're the ones who facilitate massive data storage and archival.