Why Fast-Growing Teams Outgrow Spreadsheets

In the early stages of building a team or company, spreadsheets are a gift. They’re simple, fast to set up, and familiar to just about everyone. Need to track spend, manage a process, or share information across a few people? Open a new tab in Google Sheets or Excel, and you’re off to the races.

But if your company is scaling quickly as it adds people, processes, and increasing pressure to move faster, spreadsheets can quietly become a liability.

At Beezwax, we’ve worked with hundreds of growing teams who hit the same problem. What started as a clever spreadsheet workaround slowly turned into a fragile, messy system that couldn’t keep up. In this post, we’ll break down why that happens and what comes next.

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See FileMaker analysis tools in action, including InspectorPro 9 — 2025 Claris Community Live

Special event featuring Beezwax’s Vincenzo Menanno and other Claris Partners

Gain deeper insight into how your Claris FileMaker solutions are structured and maintained. With the right developer tools, you can make changes confidently and have full visibility into the impact.

Continue reading “See FileMaker analysis tools in action, including InspectorPro 9 — 2025 Claris Community Live”

Beezwax at Build Grow Learn 2025 – Claris Community Conference

Allison Bell Presents Transforming Time: Five Leadership Strategies to Maximize Impact and Model Sustainable Success

This month, September 8–10, we’re in Greenville, SC for Build.Grow.Learn 2025, a business leadership and growth conference designed for founders, entrepreneurs, and emerging executives. Beezwax is proud to support the event and share strategic insights that help businesses scale sustainably.

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Transforming Time: Strategic Framework for Leaders, Consultants, and Individuals

Time isn’t just a constraint—it’s a system. How we engage with time influences how we lead, how we deliver value to clients, and how we build lives that are sustainable and fulfilling.

This article outlines five time transformation strategies that help individuals, consultants, and leaders shift from reactive task management to intentional, purpose-driven action. Grounded in proven operational frameworks and shaped by real-world experience across personal and professional domains, these tools support better focus, sustainable execution, and long-term alignment.

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bBox 1.06 for FileMaker enhances support for macOS text windows and Python

We are pleased to announce the release of bBox version 1.06 for Claris® FileMaker®, which adds support for macOS text windows and many update enhancements, including to bBox’s support for integrating Python code with your FileMaker apps.

bBox is a free utility plug-in to extend FileMaker solutions to easily use code libraries. Supporting both macOS & Ubuntu Linux, it has functions to help you work with Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, AppleScript, Bash/Zsh/sh, XPath, and DuckDB. Also included is a demo file that has over 220 examples of how you can put bBox functions to work for you.

If you’re interested in Python integration with FileMaker, also check out bzPython-FM, which uses bBox.

Continue reading “bBox 1.06 for FileMaker enhances support for macOS text windows and Python”

Retool, FileMaker, Airtable? Picking the Right Stack for Internal Tools

When building internal tools, you’re faced with a tough question that many fast-moving teams don’t ask soon enough:

What’s the right platform stack for what we’re trying to build?

From prebuilt dashboards to low-code platforms to fully custom apps, there are more options for internal tooling than ever—each with its own trade-offs.

  • Retool®
  • Claris FileMaker®
  • Airtable®
  • Custom-built Web Apps
  • …and plenty more depending on the department and the problem.

So how do you choose?

Continue reading “Retool, FileMaker, Airtable? Picking the Right Stack for Internal Tools”

New power for your everyday tools in FileMaker 2025 – Claris Community Live

Special event featuring Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax, with Claris product team

Watch this Claris Community Live event where Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax will join the Claris product team to discuss the enhancements available with FileMaker 2025 (v22). Learn about streamlined app upgrades, secure server integrations, and a modernized UI, prioritizing user feedback for improved functionality, enabling powerful new features for implementing AI with FileMaker.

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Native JSON Parsing in FileMaker 2025: A Revolution in Speed

In FileMaker 2025 (v22) a powerful shift has happened that changes how we work with JSON in FileMaker. This shift, thanks to JSONParse, is a huge leap forward in JSON efficiency. For any developer who has fought performance bottlenecks when handling large JSON payloads, the speed improvements are like switching from a bicycle to a Formula One racing car.

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Records, Go Get ‘Em in Claris FileMaker 2025

As a FileMaker developer, I have powerful tools. But I have long wished for a highly-efficient mechanism for representing and reproducing any arbitrary set of records. Now, it’s here, with FileMaker 2025:

GetRecordIDsFromFoundSet – function
Go To List of Records – script step

This is fantastic. Something I have wished – for a long, long time!

Now let’s cover these new methods, with an example file (which you can also download – see below).

Continue reading “Records, Go Get ‘Em in Claris FileMaker 2025”

Monthly Maintenance – Care and Feeding of Linux Servers

Maintaining the health and security of your Linux servers is more crucial than ever. With any server, you should be using real-time monitoring solutions, and performing backups every day (or more often, depending on data use). And, while you can rely on the OS to automatically install updates–especially on Windows and Mac–with Linux you benefit from a more “managed” approach to regular maintenance.

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The Sunrise, The Clock, And The Map That Covers Everything

My family vacations in Maine most years, and because it’s so far north and east, the sun rises egregiously early around the summer solstice. I was looking up the sunrise times on a chart and noticed that the earliest sunrise did not line up with the longest day. It was about a week earlier. Additionally, the latest sunset is about a week after the solstice. At the winter solstice, the latest sunrise and earliest sunset are even further off, about two weeks in either direction from the solstice.

I thought that the math behind this calculation would make for good content for an article, but the true reason behind the anomaly is much more interesting than a simple calculation, and has significantly altered my understanding of time itself.

Continue reading “The Sunrise, The Clock, And The Map That Covers Everything”

AI Agents: Transforming Enterprise IT Through Intelligent Automation

The landscape of enterprise IT stands at a pivotal moment of transformation.

As organizations navigate increasingly complex digital environments, a revolutionary approach to automation and system intelligence is emerging: AI agents. These autonomous systems represent more than just an incremental improvement over traditional automation tools—they herald a fundamental shift in how we think about and implement intelligent systems.

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Explore using REST and cURL with FileMaker Data API

With FileMaker 2024 (v21), Claris unveiled powerful features and improvements aimed at enhancing data management efficiency and security. This blog post series covers the advancements in FileMaker’s Data API (FM DAPI), focusing on REST and cURL, which offer developers greater control and flexibility in their applications.


We’re providing a tutorial file (bzTrainer-FMDAPI) to help you learn and experiment with various REST and cURL functions using FileMaker’s Data API. Enjoy exploring!

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What’s New in FileMaker Pro 21.1? Exploring AI-Powered Semantic Search, Developer Productivity Boosts, Security and More

FileMaker Pro 21.1, the newest update to Claris FileMaker 2024, introduces powerful new AI capabilities and significant quality-of-life enhancements for developers. The Beezwax team gathered to dive into these exciting updates, including Chief Innovation Officer Vincenzo Menanno, Director of Engineering Andrew “Red” Witschonke, Developer & Systems Engineer Simon Brown, and Senior Developer Fabio Bosisio. Here are the highlights from their discussion.

Continue reading “What’s New in FileMaker Pro 21.1? Exploring AI-Powered Semantic Search, Developer Productivity Boosts, Security and More”

Beezwax Sponsors EngageU FileMaker Developer Conference

Vincenzo Menanno Presents “InspectorPro 8 for FileMaker: Investigate, Accelerate, Collaborate”

This week, November 17-19, we’re in Malmö, at EngageU. It’s the largest Claris® / FileMaker® Developer conference in Europe this year, and Beezwax is proud to be a sponsor.

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Python with FileMaker®: Get Started with Analytics, Automation and AI + ML

Christos Savva from Beezwax presents at Bay Area FileMaker Developer Meetup.

Join us for an informative and interactive meetup that explores the benefits of integrating Python with FileMaker. Learn how Python can enhance your Claris FileMaker solutions by enabling data and visual analytics, IT automation, and AI + Machine Learning integration.

We’ll cover “Getting Started” with Python (using FileMaker 2024 on macOS for the demo) and briefly review various integration methods, such as web viewers, plugins and serverless options. We’ll demo an example FileMaker solution, bzPython-FM.

Continue reading “Python with FileMaker®: Get Started with Analytics, Automation and AI + ML”

Make the impossible easy with AI and FileMaker 2024 – Claris Community Live

Special event featuring Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax, with Claris product team and Partners

Sharing development examples of using AI with FileMaker, Vincenzo Menanno from Beezwax will join the Claris product team and Partners in a Claris Community Live discussion about building modern solutions, making the impossible easy.

Continue reading “Make the impossible easy with AI and FileMaker 2024 – Claris Community Live”

Git from Scratch – Gittin’ Started

This is an introduction to git. I designed this first for non-coders, and have tried to make it useful for anyone who wants to learn more fundamentals of git. We’ll do everything locally, so feel free to follow along.

Hopefully this introduction will show you how git can be used, and how it fits into things like GitHub.

Continue reading “Git from Scratch – Gittin’ Started”

Semantic Search with FileMaker 2024 – Claris Community Live

Special event featuring Will Miro from Beezwax, with Claris product team and Partners

Sharing research and demo examples of using AI with FileMaker, Will Miro from Beezwax will join the Claris product team and Partners in a Claris Community Live discussion about the new semantic search features in Claris FileMaker 2024.

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FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 3: Advanced Fun

Semantic search is a bit like LiDAR: it penetrates the data’s lexical canopy to reveal underlying meaning. In “Part 1: Fundamental Power” and “Part 2: Key Details” we covered the basics of FileMaker semantic search. Now let’s consider some more exotic ways this new feature can put a spotlight on our data.

We’ll show an example of “unified search” across multiple tables, using natural language to construct a semantic search. Then we’ll extend this to a second example, showing “unified search + actions”. A downloadable demo/tutorial file is provided for each of these two examples.

Continue reading “FileMaker Semantic Search – Part 3: Advanced Fun”

Common Refactors: Part 1 – Conditionals

In this series, I’ll talk about common refactors I suggest when doing code review in my day to day. I’ll start with conditionals, including severals example refactors. The goal is to help produce code that’s easier to read and understand, and thus, easier to maintain and produces fewer bugs.

These examples will be in TypeScript but the refactors are common patterns and can apply to most languages out there, such as Python, Ruby, Swift, PHP, Java, Go, JavaScript, etc.

Continue reading “Common Refactors: Part 1 – Conditionals”

dotFMP 2024 – Chatbot, AI with FileMaker, Technical Debt

Fabio Bosisio and Vince Menanno from Beezwax present at dotfmp Berlin, 2024.

If it’s June, we must be in Berlin for dotFMP …gathering with the developer community, and celebrating the launch of Claris FileMaker 2024, especially AI with FileMaker functionality.

As conference presenters, Fabio Bosisio and Vince Menanno from Beezwax will lead two sessions:

  • Chatbot in FileMaker 2024 {From Amazon Lex to the new GenAI}
  • ‘Til Technical Debt Do Us Part
Continue reading “dotFMP 2024 – Chatbot, AI with FileMaker, Technical Debt”

AI with FM – Amazing Intelligence with FileMaker 2024

Vince reacts with details, and his share of amazement, to the experience of pair programming with ChatGPT as co-pilot, searching for deeper meaning in FileMaker scripts using semantic search (using InspectorPro 8), and the overall experience using AI with FileMaker 2024.

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The Repository and Unit of Work Design Patterns

Most web applications we build benefit from having a separate “data access layer” (DAL) and separating business logic from database interaction.

The main advantages to this are easier testing and maintainability. Because business logic is separated from the actual implementation, you can write code in terms of higher level abstractions, rather than having to worry about specifics.

Continue reading “The Repository and Unit of Work Design Patterns”

My favorite Data Structure: The binary search tree

Ever wondered how computers organize information? Data structures are the building blocks that store and manage data efficiently.

Like filing cabinets for your computer, they decide how you can find, add, or remove information. Understanding data structures is key for developers, as they all have pros and cons, and choosing the right one can make or break your solution!

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User’s Sandbox: Performance, data integrity, and UX for FileMaker

The “User’s Sandbox” (aka “Local File”) technique builds a sandbox for data editing by users, protecting data integrity and transactionality, without sacrificing usability. After refining this approach to prioritize user experience and security, at Beezwax we’ve used it for years, adapting it to build more performant, more accurate, better looking, and more functional Claris FileMaker applications.

Andrew “Red” Witschonke, Director of Engineering at Beezwax, first presented on the User’s Sandbox technique at Claris Engage 2024 — the premier event for the FileMaker development community, held at Apple’s Austin Campus and hosted by Claris, an Apple company.

Continue reading “User’s Sandbox: Performance, data integrity, and UX for FileMaker”

Beezwax’s Vincenzo Menanno Wins Claris Excellence Award for Lifetime Achievement

Recognized as a “pillar of the Claris Community”, Vince Menanno is honored for Long-time Technical Excellence, Developer Advocacy, Sharing Expertise and Passion with Customers and Developers

February, 2024 – AUSTIN, Tex.Claris International Inc., an Apple company, named Vincenzo (Vince) Menanno of Beezwax as winner of the Claris Excellence Award for Lifetime Achievement. The award was presented during Claris Engage 2024, February 6th-8th at the Apple Austin Campus.

This award highlights Vince Menanno‘s 30+ year career as a consultant, technical innovator, developer advocate and community leader. Claris honored Vince with the Lifetime Achievement Award which “salutes a Claris Partner or community member who is a long-time pillar of the Claris Community and recognized as a leader whose voice is respected.”

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Rock Solid Business Logic: The Action Pattern

The Action Pattern is a rock solid solution for organizing business logic in an application. It works quite well for medium to large-ish projects. I like the Action Pattern because it introduces few concepts, unlike some more elaborate and complex designs. It’s flexible, scalable and helps me feel more confident in handling complex business logic in my work as a developer. Even though generative AI now plays a bigger role in programming, it does not replace actual software design, and the Action Pattern can be a great tool to have in your toolbox!

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System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads

Our UX/Design team shared their process for creating display ads, for Google Ads and social media campaigns, using a system to optimize collaboration between Design and Marketing teams.

Our marketing team wanted to implement a design system that could quickly generate different variations of display ads in multiple sizes, based on IAB Fixed Size Ad Specifications. This system had to balance creative freedom and brand adherence. We wanted users to be able to change content, colors, backgrounds, buttons and other visual elements without heavy involvement from a designer. However, it was important to create a systematic approach, so ads would stay on brand and follow a conceptual and visual pattern.

Continue reading “System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads”

Google Ads Essentials: Common Challenges in Ads Performance

Google Ads, previously known as Google AdWords, has become indispensable to business advertising strategies. It’s no longer just an option; it’s a pivotal element in a company’s marketing efforts.

Continue reading “Google Ads Essentials: Common Challenges in Ads Performance”

Dynamic FileMaker UI Using Layout Calculations

Layout calculations in Claris FileMaker enable us to include dynamic elements in text objects. This is a deceptively powerful addition to FileMaker’s layout capabilities. We’ll describe how layout calculations work, and detail three interesting things about them.

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Harnessing Business Momentum with Claris® FileMaker®

Russ Catanach is Marketing Director at Beezwax, as well as host of the podcast DIY For Business. He’s sharing his insights, especially from a business perspective, on being a longtime Claris FileMaker user and developer.


Harnessing momentum is a crucial factor in business success. You can fuel innovation, enhance efficiency, and foster growth by leveraging past achievements and embracing swift progress.

Continue reading “Harnessing Business Momentum with Claris® FileMaker®”

Handling Historical Data with FileMaker and AWS Athena, S3 & Serverless

In this blog post, we will explore a solution for optimising a FileMaker app that handles large amounts of data. We will address the challenges of data storage, file corruption, and performance degradation when dealing with historical data.

By leveraging cloud storage and serverless computing, we can offload and query this data efficiently, ensuring better performance and scalability.

Continue reading “Handling Historical Data with FileMaker and AWS Athena, S3 & Serverless”

Tableau Conference 2023 – Highlights

Greetings from Tableau Conference 2023 (TC23) in Las Vegas, and beyond. Beezwax’s Data Analytics & Tableau Developer team is attending, both in-person and virtual.

TC23 is designed to reveal and inspire, with new product information, plus Tableau (and Salesforce) company roadmaps. More importantly, there’s plenty of insight from TC23 sessions including technical topics, case studies, thought leadership, cool demos, community inspiration, and hands-on learning.

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Let’s make an audit log with Claris FileMaker

Claris FileMaker puts powerful, native audit logging within reach of developers, with a greatly reduced code footprint compared to existing approaches. In this blog post we introduce the OnWindowTransaction script trigger, leveraging it along with native FileMaker script transactions to create an audit log that is efficient, scalable, flexible, performant, and convenient to implement.

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Los Altos Hacks – Largest West Coast Student Hackathon

As the 2023 Hackathon Season hits springtime, this weekend brings Los Altos Hacks VII. This event is a 2-day, student-led, in-person hackathon…and the largest high school hackathon on the West Coast.

We’re proud to sponsor and provide mentors, and especially, we can’t wait to see what these talented developers can build!

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End to End Web Integration for Claris® Platforms

Alec Gregory from Beezwax presents at the Claris Beyond Meetup.

Let’s talk about building web UIs, JavaScript functions and new integrations for Claris FileMaker and Claris Pro. Learn how you can manage various stages of the web integration process with the open source bzBond.

Continue reading “End to End Web Integration for Claris® Platforms”

Modern Full-Stack Web Frameworks: When to use What and Why

When it comes to choosing web development technologies, we now have more options than ever. And while that’s a good thing, it also poses a problem. Answering the question, “What is the ideal technology for this new project?” is not as easy as it used to be. In this post, I briefly highlight the most popular full-stack web frameworks, and why you might want to choose each of them.

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Panel & Networking: How Technology Can Lead The Way For Digital Transformation

As each of our clients weathers unique challenges, “digital transformation” comes to mind as something that exists in different stages. Some organizations are long-since transformed by technology, while others shifted more recently toward work dominated by the distributed as well as the digital.

In building custom applications to automate workflows, streamline operations and leverage technical advantages through innovation, we harness the power of digital transformation. We’re helping many organizations maintain existing momentum to position themselves for positive upswings, and others to recover from economic downturns, overcome turbulence in operations, or head off uncertainty about technical resources.

Digital transformation supports organizational transformation. And it can also lead this transition.

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Datathon for Social Good 2022 @ UC Berkeley

Datathon for Social Good 2022 is the 4th-annual event for UC Berkeley students to show off their data science skills through real-world project applications. With a focus on technology applied toward social good, this Datathon allows participants the opportunity to explore and tackle current social issues by employing data science to leave a real-world impact.

An Exploration into Environmental Justice & Urban Sciences

This year’s Datathon has several competition tracks that focus on different societal issues ranging from urban sciences to environmental sustainability. Datasets and tools will be provided by CalData, Earth Hacks and Deepnote. Teams create visualizations, analyses, or machine learning models addressing any aspect of the given datasets, which are then presented to partnering organizations and judges.

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GitOps with GitHub Actions

Today we’re going to talk about GitOps with GitHub Actions, including an example of this workflow:

A developer team creates a new branch, with a Pull Request (PR), which triggers a GitHub Action, which runs AWS CodeDeploy, which deploys the application code update from GitHub to a web application on an Amazon EC2 instance.

Originally presented at Beezwax’s internal “Developer Show & Share”, this video presentation covers “GitOps with GitHub Actions” by Victor Olivo, Beezwax DevOps Engineer.

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The Benefits of Automated Testing

Software changes over time. Your company’s web site this year does things you had no idea you needed two years ago. How can we keep the cost of change manageable?

Automated testing is one way. Especially for large software projects, the practice of automated testing can dramatically reduce the cost of adapting software to new business necessities.

Continue reading “The Benefits of Automated Testing”

The Human Resource – Beezwax Anniversary Edition

26 years in, a founding Bee reflects.

Julian Nadel is president and founder of Beezwax. He’s celebrating the 26th Anniversary of Beezwax with this update to his original Beezwax Blog post.

In 2014, a colleague interviewed me about Beezwax; the interview transcript was the orginal basis for the article herein. It was then and still is now one of the only public summaries of my thoughts on how Beezwax works, and why.

Since being published, the article has been a meaningful springboard for many conversations I’ve had… with existing Beez, clients, and colleagues… and people new to Beezwax. As we reach another milestone – completing our 26th year – I’m taking this opportunity to revisit the article and provide an update.

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Beezwax Wins Claris Excellence Award

Beezwax Recognized for Advocacy Excellence, Sharing Expertise and Passion with Customers and Developers In the Claris Community

CUPERTINO, Calif. – Dec. 15, 2021Claris International Inc., an Apple company, named Beezwax Datatools Inc. as winner of the Advocacy Excellence Award as part of the Claris Excellence Awards for 2021, which honor Claris Partners and Claris Community members who have made outstanding contributions and accomplishments around the globe in 2021.

Partners and community members are selected for their award-worthy achievements using the Claris platform. The Advocacy Excellence Award recognizes a Claris partner for sharing expertise and passion while increasing awareness of Claris products and expanding the Claris Community of users and developers.

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A fast, flexible Tableau Connector for FileMaker

Building a custom Tableau® Connector for Claris® FileMaker® enables faster, more reliable and more flexible connections between Tableau and FileMaker datasources, compared with the legacy Web Data Connector.

For a number of Beezwax client projects, we’ve installed and deployed a Tableau Connector (aka “TACO”) for FileMaker. The TACO was built using the Tableau Connector SDK (provided by Tableau) to connect to datasources on FileMaker Server. The TACO method uses JDBC rather than the FileMaker Data API for the connection between FileMaker and Tableau, and in our testing the performance of data extracts was up to 10 times faster.

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Integrating FileMaker’s Data API and Ruby with the fmrest-ruby gem

We often work on projects that intersect two technologies near and dear to us: FileMaker and Ruby. This allows us to build robust web applications in Ruby on Rails, integrated with data sources from FileMaker solutions. When Claris introduced the FileMaker Data API we were naturally curious to try it out. At the time there was no off-the-shelf Ruby library for us to simply gem install, so we decided to roll up our sleeves and build one. Thus, fmrest-ruby was born.

This article will walk you through setting up and using fmrest-ruby in a Ruby on Rails project. Some level of familiarity with Ruby/Rails and FileMaker’s Data API is advised, although much of the content covered here is applicable to any Ruby project, Rails or not.

Continue reading “Integrating FileMaker’s Data API and Ruby with the fmrest-ruby gem”

OData for FileMaker – New Player in an Old Game

This blog post is the first in a series about the FileMaker OData API, highlighting key features that make it an exciting addition to the Claris FileMaker platform.

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OOP Fundamentals: The Decorator Pattern

The decorator pattern is one of my favorite patterns. It is simple, extensible and powerful. It feels like it follows the essence of object oriented programming beautifully. Sadly though, it is also easy to be misused or misunderstood. So, in this post I will show you the essence of the decorator pattern, illustrated with a few examples.

Continue reading “OOP Fundamentals: The Decorator Pattern”

OOP Fundamentals: The Dependency Inversion Principle

The dependency inversion principle is one of the cornerstones of object-oriented programming. Without it, there is no object-oriented design. It’s that important.

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Dark and Light Modes: 3 Simple Paths to FileMaker UX

FileMaker 19 introduced support for Dark Mode. Not only does the application’s chrome support Dark Mode (like many applications), but developers now have the ability to detect the OS Dark Mode setting.

Let’s look at three easy techniques to give FileMaker Pro users a choice between Dark Mode and Light Mode, plus an option to automatically adapt modes based on OS settings.

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Composition over Inheritance, with JavaScript examples

If you are into object-oriented programming, you most likely have heard about composition over inheritance. The concept itself is simple: Whenever possible, prefer to compose objects rather than introducing inheritance.

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Dynamic Forms with JavaScript and FileMaker Web Viewers

Using the FileMaker platform we can harness the power and wow-factor of modern web interfaces. This post shows how we can build dynamic data-entry forms for use in our apps.
Continue reading “Dynamic Forms with JavaScript and FileMaker Web Viewers”

Connect FileMaker Server to Oracle Server and Oracle Cloud Using ODBC and TCPS

A longtime enterprise client recently asked us to integrate a FileMaker Server with an Oracle server. No problem, right? This task requires some development to optimize the database schema and script the data sync, but using FileMaker and an ODBC driver to connect to Oracle is straightforward.

Continue reading “Connect FileMaker Server to Oracle Server and Oracle Cloud Using ODBC and TCPS”

How to enable WebKit and JavaScript debugging in FileMaker Web Viewers

FileMaker supports bidirectional communication between a web viewer and data or scripts. So, you may find yourself doing more development using plenty of web code and JavaScript integrations.

If you’re having difficulty getting your HTML, CSS, or JavaScript to render in a FileMaker web viewer, there’s a great way to help inspect and fix it. You just need to know the hidden option to enable WebKit debugging in FileMaker web viewers.

Continue reading “How to enable WebKit and JavaScript debugging in FileMaker Web Viewers”

Beezwax Web Team Code Review: a blog post with ulterior motives

I have ulteI want you hacking, at Beezwaxrior motives.
Continue reading “Beezwax Web Team Code Review: a blog post with ulterior motives”

Better, Faster Random Text for FileMaker

We often need large amounts of random text to simulate real-world data loads while building a FileMaker solution. I was looking to create a large chunks of unique data for testing — we’re talking at least millions of characters. Here, I’ll compare the performance of a few methods I tried.

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Quick FileMaker Server Stats.log Summaries

When making changes to a FileMaker file or a FileMaker Server’s configuration, it is often useful to know if the changes have helped, or made things worse, or perhaps had no effect at all. FileMaker’s Stats.log generates some data needed to summarize this, with some help from monitoring and analysis tools, or in this case, a Python script.

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Beezwax Sponsors Vienna Calling 2025 – FileMaker Developer Conference

Vincenzo Menanno Presents “Till Technical Debt do us Part!”

This week, June 5-7, we’re in Austria, at Vienna Calling 2025. The Claris® FileMaker® Developer conference feature open discussions, interactive workshops and collaborative break-out sessions. Beezwax is proud to be a conference sponsor.

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Beezwax Presents at Elevate FM 2025 – Toronto FileMaker Developer Conference

Vincenzo Menanno Presents “Modernizing Code – Maintaining Your Investment”

This week, May 26th, we’re at Elevate FM 2025, a brand new conference taking place in downtown Toronto, Canada. The Claris® FileMaker® Developer conference features sessions by industry experts, training workshops and interactive discussions.

Continue reading “Beezwax Presents at Elevate FM 2025 – Toronto FileMaker Developer Conference”

Using OData, Syslog or DuckDB to handle FileMaker Schema Change Notifications (via Plug-in API)

FileMaker Server v21.1 (2024) introduced functionality for plug-ins to receive notifications of changes to database schema, layout, custom functions, or scripts. Notification messaging is passed in the form of JSON. Let’s show a few examples of these JSON payloads, and how a plug-in might use external tools (Syslog, DuckDB or OData) to handle things.

Continue reading “Using OData, Syslog or DuckDB to handle FileMaker Schema Change Notifications (via Plug-in API)”

Resetting the Admin Console IP Address Block in FileMaker Server

Under its Administration: Administrator screen, FileMaker Server’s Admin Console has a feature you can use to restrict access so that only certain IP addresses are allowed to connect. Although usually a useful feature, here we’ll discuss how to turn it off if it isn’t working correctly.

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