Thanks for chiming in. Welcome @mrocharde !
@mrocharde Welcome to the fmSoup! And thank you for your comment. Good to hear that.
Thanks Michael, you were the best interviewer with the most challenging question. The 5 licence minimum is a rip-off, but he dodged it a bit
I don't think dodged is the right phrase. He acknowledged it, said they were talking about it, and recognize they need to figure something out. Means they don't have an answer yet.
Thank you, Vincent. We were lucky to get Brad to come on and while he didn't promise any solutions, I think the interview showed that they weee aware or, and concerned, about the issues we raised. . BTW Nick Lightbody referred me to FMSoup and I'm glad he did.
Thanks for the kind words. We started this podcast with the idea of having a few interesting conversations in and around FileMaker between two lifelong developers and we had absolutely no idea that it would take off the way it has. When we hit 1000 downloads we were over the moon but the numbers kept climbing and now we are closing in on 36K. What's also extraordinary is how many people have written in. www,firesidefilemaker.com/reviews plus how many leading figures in the community that we've been able to coerce i nto a conversation. Lots more to come so keep listening. Thanks again. Michael
I loved this clip of Steve Jobs, I hadnt seen him talking in that mode before - thanks @FileKraft!
According to Brad Freitag, â...the market is currently saturated with various low-code platforms...The growth of low code is, at least in part, heavily dependent on the expansion of cloud services, APIs, and open-source communities.â
Clarisâ future will be bright if they can quickly and effectively implement his vision. If so, weâll all be better off.
The problem is that Filemaker is a totally inefficient cloud platform
I think that FileMaker would be used to utilise cloud platforms, not to be the cloud platform.
Services like Claris Connect have to be driven from somewhere. FileMaker is a great tool to build the UI for low-code connectors.
Whether an offering is efficient or inefficient depends on the use case. A sports car is totally inefficient in transporting large quantities of goods. A truck is totally inefficient in transporting people fast. So FileMaker in a Cloud may not be an ideal solution for you and me, but a good solution for someone else.
Well, given that to make Filemaker cloud workable you have to ditch all the nice features of Filemaker that makes it a RAD, and that you have to basically rewrite all record editing to write them using PSOS, completely short circuiting the native way of developing in filemaker, that counts as a totally inefficient RAD platform in my book.
See Vince's Menano excellent transaction youtube video, Filemaker performances is appalling.
Plus the makerting that wants to let you think that you can write a solution in filemaker and deploy it as is, to Go, Webdirect and Cloud is blatently false as you've to rewrite the solution for all the wan platfoms
The problem is that Claris is selling a car for cloud but delivers a bicycle.
It is structurally inefficient to work over the WAN, due to its insane chattiness.
It can be useful for some, but even for them it's still use inefficient underpinnings.
Same thing everywhere: Check the offer. If it fits your needs, buy it. If it does not fit, look for something else. Free Choice.
This is a jaded and not accurate statement.
- Use unstored calcs : No
- Use the native way to edit a record : No, put everything in Globals, then create a json, then PSOS the thing, unless you want to wait 28 seconds just to edit 10 records.
- Want to use media fiels : rely on Filemaker native media functions, no, create x version of the same images to get somewhat decent speed.
So yes, to get workable perfs don't use Filemaker nice stuff, store everything flat, denormalize everything
That's positively insane when you're supossed to be a Cloud first company.
Do you have to do any of teh above in airtable ? No you just use the nativ tools, you don't circumvent them.
Those are still not accurate. Since I build a lot for WAN deployments, some things are normal. They are the types of things that cloud services are doing for you in the background. You can't really slow airtable down, because it's already ridiculously limited in functionality. Is that what you are asking Claris to give you? A limited, stripped down, fairly useless piece of SAAS?
FileMaker is more open and robust. It allows you to do more. I've tested many things on FileMaker Cloud. Yeah, it's limited, it's always going to be. SalesForce, SQL Server, MySQL, Airtable, all of them you can bring to their knees by HOW you use it.
- Unstored calcs don't even exist in many database platforms. Local to a table, they work fine. Just don't over do it.
- Native way to edit a record works fine. Do it all the time. I choose transactions most of them time because data integrity matters to me. This is not a FileMaker specific issue. I choose transactions in every database platform. Web-based forms also don't allow direct editing of data. It's isolated to the form which then separates the data entry from the actual setting of the data. You do the same thing in FileMaker, it's going to be faster... because, well, computer science.
- No I don't rely on FileMaker's native media functions... why would I? I use services that are purpose-built for handing that stuff. I wouldn't hire a go-kart driver to drive tractor-trailer. They just are purpose-built for the same thing. If it's something simple, sure.
- And if your record edits take 28 seconds to edit 10 records... you have a structure problem. I regularly, over the WAN edit hundreds of records a second, without using PSOS. I rarely use PSOS, except when I want to isolate logging from the actual transaction.
Cloud Smart not Cloud First.
Correct. And Bento was the same way. Limited. Mostly flat. Few tools for professional developers. Is that the kind of dev you want to be?
If airtable solves your problem, you can simplify you custom app significantly. And that will give you amazing performance. You canât do in airtable the same things you are doing in FileMaker. Airtable just took away your ability to louse it up.
@Vincent_L
I'm a bit surprised you would complain about elements involving normalization and point to a product that seems it is not implementing even primary keys.
Comparisons aside, I would like to remind you and everyone else:
- This topic is about Brad's interview with both Fireside FileMaker and ZDNet. Please stay on topic and avoid taking the discussion towards comparisons for companies, products, development practices and personal preferences for each as those are off-topic.
- Should you choose to discuss those under their own topic, please keep the discussion constructive for everyone to enjoy the discussion, as it happens and later on.
- Consider taking your topic to the HVAC channel as necessary
Let this be considered a moderator's friendly warning. Please act accordingly.
@Vincent_L Sorry but first of all FileMaker was not developed as a cloud platform; that is just a recent strategy to gain efficiencies and lower costs. As to your comment about it being inefficient, I'd love to hear what you mean by this as I would contend that it is a highly efiicient development tool or are you just playing the devils advocate and, if so, why? Today's world is filled with so much negativity and it seems to be a popular bandwagon to jump on. If your dislike of FileMaker comes from a place of real knowledge and understanding of it and how it works, I (and I'm sure many others on this forum) will be happy to address those points. If, on the other hand, it stems from the fact that you can't get it to do what you want it to and you think that it should be easy, then I recommend you move to something fundamental like AirTable. FileMaker⢠is an immensely powerful program of great depth but it takes a very long time indeed to be really good at it. (I've spent more than 70K hours working with it and I still learn someething new almost every day but I can also do magic with it..