Hi James,

Sorry for the delay -- I get the digest. As has been said already, FileMaker talks to the Web these days via FileMaker Server; which brings me to another question: which version of FileMaker are these servers running? (The web bits have been on FileMaker Server since version 7.) A few other notes:

1) With the Web bits being on the server rather than the client, performance is much better than it used to be. In brief, you can have 100 connections simultaneously, and as XML/PHP connections are stateless, each one of those connections should only last a few seconds, at most. That's a lot of traffic. And one server will work just fine.

2) MySQL is still faster (we're talking orders of magnitude) and scales even more, but it does take more to administer. Whether you move or not depends on your needs, and how the databases are being used. I would venture to say that most of the time what you need will strongly point to one over the other. For what it's worth, FileMaker and PHP work just great together (I've been doing it since 2001).

3) Even if you stick with FileMaker, there are a number of options available to you: Lasso is still used by a number of folks; the FileMaker API for PHP is the "official" route, much like CDML was back in the day; and I use FX.php -- which is faster and quite simply easier to debug than the FileMaker API (I have some other bias too, but I won't go into that...)

I'd be happy to answer any other questions that you may have, though you may want to CC me directly to avoid having to wait for the digest to come to me =) Hope all of this is helpful. Best,

--Chris Hansen
FileMaker 7/8/9 Certified Developer
Creator of FX.php
"The best way from FileMaker to the Web."
www.iViking.org

On Dec 14, 2010, at 9:40 PM, <fmpro@lists.lassosoft.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> Apologies in advance if this question is asked a lot.
>
> I am picking up a web project for a grant, and I found that they have
> a couple of Mac Filemaker servers. One is the server, and the other
> one is the "client" and interacts with the web. No problems so far, I
> have a lot of experience in this area as I did years of
> Filemaker/Lasso work for my old school district.
>
> However, they want to update their hardware and software while the
> grant moneys are available, and I am weighing heavily whether or not I
> should recommend they flat out update the computers and newer versions
> of Filemaker, or switch to a MySQL/PHP solution.
>
> They do occasionally interact with the database directly. There is not
> a lot of web traffic, but it needs to work when teachers order kits. I
> think the main thing is they would like to consolidate everything on
> one server, and I'm not sure if new versions of Filemaker can do this
> and serve out web pages without a major performance hit.
>
>
> Thanks for any advice.
>
>
> James




#############################################################
This message is sent to you because you are subscribed to
the mailing list <fmpro@lists.lassosoft.com>.
To unsubscribe, E-mail to: <fmpro-off@lists.lassosoft.com>
To switch to the DIGEST mode, E-mail to <fmpro-digest@lists.lassosoft.com>
To switch to the INDEX mode, E-mail to <fmpro-index@lists.lassosoft.com>
Send administrative queries to <fmpro-request@lists.lassosoft.com>