If FileMaker Pro is your primary workgroup group tool, you know that it is “mission critical” to your everyday business functions. Typically, your workgroup solution solves most, if not all, administrative functions, providing a repository for institutional knowledge and data about your business. However, there is often other software, and sometimes hardware, that have functionality external to your core workgroup solution and needs to be integrated with your FileMaker solution. You might use an accounting package such as QuickBooks, or an e-commerce solution to manage a digital archive and connect to various Web services provided by your vendors, such as FedEx or UPS.

FileMaker’s plug-in architecture allows for many innovative and powerful extensions to FileMaker in order to accomplish some of the integration issues mentioned above. One of the key factors in FileMaker integration is PHP, a scripting language similar in some respects to Microsoft’s ASP. Most users associate PHP with web design, as it is most often used as a means of dynamically displaying Web content from a database backend. However, the PHP language has a rich function library that can do more than just create Web pages. As a scripting language, PHP has powerful tools for handling arrays that are not available natively in FileMaker. For example, you can execute FTP, HTTP, and SQL queries for most databases. You can manipulate files and images, interact with Web services via SOAP, and many other functions as well. (See all at http://us2.php.net/manual/en/funcref.php)

Developers leverage a suite of FileMaker plug-ins to extend FileMaker’s native functionality. At Colibri Solutions, we have been working extensively with a plug-in called SmartPill, developed by Micah Woods at Scodigo, that allows FileMaker to execute PHP directly. SmartPill has allowed us to take advantage of the large PHP function library and thus extend FileMaker’s functionality and integration capabilities, all from within the PHP framework. Essentially, we’ve been able to use PHP as a Swiss Army knife, or quasi-universal plug-in, for FileMaker. SmartPill reduces the number of plug-ins necessary and also provides a common framework, PHP, for solving integration problems.

There is also another plug-in from Shubeck in Germany that also will allow FileMaker to execute PHP. We have not used this plug-in yet, and so we welcome those of you who have used it to provide feedback of your experiences, especially if you have also used SmartPill and can provide a direct feature comparison.

Next week, I’ll post some techniques we have found useful in managing FileMaker, PHP, and SmartPill.

J Sciarra
Chief Technologist