I watched a few videos and it looks very interesting. I think I would have installed it tonight if they supported Android and checked it out. They listed so many supported platforms I was a little shocked Android was not yet on the list. I do see Android support is in beta.
Though as cool as it looks it seems to lack the polish FileMaker has. Granted that is an opinion I formed by only watching 30 minutes of videos so not sure how accurate that opinion is. I do think I will keep an eye out and consider trying it once Android is supported. I doubt I will replace FileMaker for my main business but it looks like it might be fun to build things for myself or friends. That in time could lead to replacing FileMaker though in the future I guess.
Though if FileMaker supports Android first I might not have the need anymore.
This is exactly my personal problem! In theory, I will be retired in the fall this year... paying all those fancy 'rental-stuff' becomes problematic, having a site-license for fm as well (I loved that as long I could 'buy not rent' - but starting with 18, only renting is available (fba..))
As for now, I decided to 'follow the path as a proffensional' until 2022, 3 more years - but that does not solve the problem with rental. I already canceled some other subscriptions..
Sure. It is not as quick to develop a solution but you can create ANY type of solution- games, educational, database driven, web apps, industrial interface apps, hardware projects, console apps etc etc etc.
The kicker for me is no royalties for deployment and the ability to talk with any database.
I am suprised every year that there is already another annual fee due
today, I got way too much rental stuff, even xojo... cost about 500 bucks a year (I do believe that it is important to support sw companies and therefore I pay for upgrades...)
times are incredible stressy here at the moment, a bit less stress in my age would be such a gain in comfort...
so many things change over the versions that have absolutely NO, I repeat: NO benefit (at least for one's personal needs). Just take the changes in Mail on iOS13 where You have to multi-click to reply, the fancy-looking new buttons that are smaller (eyes will get older as well..), the fancy smilies...
This deployment issue is why I can't get my Visual FoxPro client to consider FMP/S. Currently, they have 40 users all happily going along on a royalty-free EXE. They would never consider moving to a $10K+/year platform - not to mention the coding conversion required (extensive!) if it could even be done without a major redesign (doubtful).
I'm in the same boat for now having started to test XOJO development last weekend. First thing I did was translating/transforming the database from FM to Sqlite. Next I throw all this on ARGen, a XOJO framework to get a starting point for databased applications, just to get an idea on how things might get translated from one world to the other. Very interesting and I'm looking forward to get my hands dirty with coding
The XOJO ide looks really outdated and I have yet to get an idea on UI transformation because my actual FM relies on SVG and all the stuff you can do with it, but I suppose there will be some way...
And all this only because of FM/Claris throwing away runtimes. What a pity.
Have you just considered doing full stack development? With JavaScript you have all the same "controls" using a library like DOJO. Then connect your front end to middle and back ends. Sure, there's a bit more coding, but you could literally do whatever you need to in the mainstream language of your choice. While Xojo looks appealing initially, Real Basic is hardly mainstream and the developer community, though enthusiastic, is tiny.
Whilst I would love to develop in a non proprietary language many of them don’t have the tools that make it easy to do so. Mainly most of them lack a good IDE. I used to use Java years ago but having to have the environment installed on the client became really tiresome - I like the appeal of a simple binary executable.
How long did/does it take you to re-create all the table / grid / data relationship (1:M, M:M, etc.) so easy to do in, solid in, and built into, FMP?
If you used to do Java, then recall that you can compile an entire application to a single JAR file or a WAR file (deploy-able in an app server). Thus, deployment with Java is super easy. Those JAR and WAR files have ALL the dependencies built in them (ZIP format). Thus, the only thing a client needs is a JRE installed. That's it.
Admittedly it was a LONG time ago when we used to deploy Java solutions - it was during the era of JAR Hell as it was know at the time. Haven't touched it since.
In terms of the database side - I've never been comfortable really with how FileMaker works with the table occurrences, context etc. Having worked on RDBMS systems for over 30 years it always seemed a little odd having developer layouts in order to do things just so I would be in the correct context. On Xojo I use a tool called ARGen https://strawberrysw.com/argen/- it's not free but will create the object relational mapping for you along with the classes and basic CRUD (&browsing) code.
It's early days but I have to say I'm really enjoying programming again and not scripting.
