bzPython-FM easily performs Python code within FileMaker, using the bBox plugin.
There are literally thousands of Python packages out there, for AI and Machine Learning, data analysis, data science and IT automation — now at your fingertips from within FileMaker.
Continue reading “bzPython-FM performs Python for your FileMaker apps”I collected some thoughts and observations from EngageU 2023, the European Claris / FileMaker Developer Conference held Nov 12-14 in Antwerp. Beezwax was proud to be a sponsor. There were plenty of technical discussions, a few described here, and even moreso, plenty of things that should make us all inspired heading toward 2024. If last year’s conference were the “Biggest Claris FileMaker Conference of 2022“, this year’s EngageU was the Most Inspiring, as well as the Biggest of 2023.
Continue reading “EngageU 2023 – Most Inspiring Claris FileMaker Development Conference”This week, November 12-14, we’re in Antwerp, at EngageU. It’s one of the biggest Claris® / FileMaker® Developer community events worldwide this year, and Beezwax is proud to be a sponsor.
Continue reading “Beezwax Sponsors EngageU Claris FileMaker Developer Conference”I find search and replace to be a remarkably interesting topic, because it touches on so many Vim concepts. As a text editor, one of Vim’s superpower is composability, which enables combining small commands to accomplish complex tasks with search and replace.
Continue reading “Advanced Search and Replace with Vim”The pandas library for Python has become a go-to tool for many data scientists and analysts. In this blog post, we’ll examine one strategy for leveraging the highly powerful tools within pandas to enhance data analysis capabilities using the Claris FileMaker platform. We’ll do this by calling the bBox plugin and its built-in Python functions.
Continue reading “Leveraging pandas with Python to Analyze FileMaker Data Sets”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.
Continue reading “Dynamic FileMaker UI Using Layout Calculations”Will a new client contact me today? Will they tomorrow?
As a business owner, salesperson, or marketer, you cannot afford to wait for business to come to you passively. You are likely doing everything you can think of (and afford) to attract new business while also doing your best to keep past customers happy.
What you may not realize is that you are sitting on a gold mine. There’s a treasure trove of past leads and customers that you must do everything possible to activate. Mining through your Contacts database is like panning for gold. Sure, it can be tedious, but the Gold Miners who actively search regularly find areas likely to be more prosperous.
Continue reading “Data Gold: Uncovering Qualified Sales Leads in Your Database”Pause (née “PauseOnError”) this week, highlighted by FileMaker Summer Camp in the northern Georgia hills.
Continue reading “Pause 2023, an (un)conference”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®”FileMaker® developers and users now have a clearer picture of their platform’s future thanks to Claris’s unified and simplified platform strategy. This latest news, announced August 29, rolls back the idea of a dual-platform strategy announced a year ago, and highlights the continued support for FileMaker as central to ongoing Claris® product plans.
Continue reading “Claris Product Roadmap 2023 – Streamlining FileMaker Solutions”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”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.
Continue reading “Tableau Conference 2023 – Highlights”Claris FileMaker 2023 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.
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!
Continue reading “Los Altos Hacks – Largest West Coast Student Hackathon”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”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.
Continue reading “Modern Full-Stack Web Frameworks: When to use What and Why”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.
Continue reading “Panel & Networking: How Technology Can Lead The Way For Digital Transformation”This week, Nov 13-15, we’re in Malmö, at EngageU. It’s the biggest Claris / FileMaker Developer community event worldwide in 2022. In fact, EngageU promises to be the largest in-person Claris Community event in Europe, ever!
Continue reading “Beezwax Sponsors EngageU: The Biggest Claris® FileMaker® Developer Conference”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.
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.
Continue reading “Datathon for Social Good 2022 @ UC Berkeley”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.
Continue reading “GitOps with GitHub Actions”This week we’re in Italy… formazione, condivisione e ancora divertimento [training, sharing and more fun] …with the focus on innovations in Claris® FileMaker platform development. As realtori [conference speakers] at Rome FileMaker Week (October 6-8), Vince Menanno and Fabio Bosisio from Beezwax present three sessions:
The 2022 Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) highlighted new ways for developers to build with APIs, introducing updates to Swift® and Safari®, revealing improvements in accessibility, and uncovering a mountain of innovative product upgrades and releases. We’re sharing a summary of news and resources we collected from WWDC 2022 sessions, along with an ongoing series of updates to this blog post.
Continue reading “Apple WWDC 2022 and beyond”Beezwax’s Tableau development and data analytics team has grown rapidly in recent years. In 2021, we achieved the status of Tableau Services Partner, and we’re proud to highlight several Beez — Josh, Sarah and Jules — who have earned Tableau certifications.
Continue reading “Highlighting Tableau Certification at Beezwax”
The process for creating Google Display ads, using a system to optimize collaboration between Design and Marketing teams.
Our design team wanted to implement a design system that could quickly generate different variations of Google Display ads in multiple sizes. This system had to balance creative freedom and brand adherence. We wanted a user to be able to change content, colors, backgrounds, buttons and other visual elements without further involvement from a designer. However, it was important to create a controlled environment so the ads would stay on brand and follow a conceptual and visual pattern.
Continue reading “System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads”We are pleased to release bBox version 0.99 for Claris® FileMaker® on macOS and Linux with new NodeJS and Python 3 integration, and M1 Apple silicon support for GraphicsMagick image processing and JQ JSON parsing functions.
bBox is a free utility plug-in to extend Claris FileMaker solutions to easily use macOS and Linux code libraries and functions from Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, AppleScript, C/C++, Bash/sh, XPath, and SQLite. Also included is a demo file with more than 210 examples of how you can put bBox functions to work for you.
bBox is available on macOS and Linux, and runs with either FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Server. Here’s what FileMaker Magazine had to say about bBox version 0.99:
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.
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.
Continue reading “The Human Resource – Beezwax Anniversary Edition”CUPERTINO, Calif. – Dec. 15, 2021 – Claris 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.
Continue reading “Beezwax Wins Claris Excellence Award”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.
Continue reading “A fast, flexible Tableau Connector for FileMaker”When the Apple silicon Macs with M1 chips came out, I read and watched many of the reviews. Most of them had great things to say about the promise of Apple’s new M1 chip…I was impressed. When I finally received my Apple M1 MacBook Pro, and started to use it…I was amazed.
Back in 2020, FileMaker Pro 19.2 wasn’t optimized yet for Apple silicon processors, but ran fine under Rosetta emulation. On my M1 MacBook Pro, it already felt much faster than running FileMaker “natively” on an Intel-based MacBook…I was astonished.
Today, I’m running the just-released Claris FileMaker® 19.3, with native support for Apple’s M1 chip, on a new MacBook Pro. It is, in a word: Astounding!
Continue reading “FileMaker Performance on Apple M1 | Astounding!”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”This blog post is the first in a three-part series about the FileMaker OData API, highlighting key features that make it an exciting addition to the Claris FileMaker platform.
Continue reading “OData for FileMaker – New Player in an Old Game”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”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.
Continue reading “OOP Fundamentals: The Dependency Inversion Principle”FileMaker 19 introduced a couple of important new features related to using the FileMaker Data API. Here, we’ll cover an overview of the new authorization endpoint, Validate Session, API versioning updates, as well as a new script step, Execute FileMaker Data API.
At the end of this article, you’ll find the demo file for learning more and trying out various REST and cURL functionality with FileMaker’s Data API. Enjoy!
Continue reading “Using REST and cURL with FileMaker’s Data API”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.
Continue reading “Dark and Light Modes: 3 Simple Paths to FileMaker UX”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.
Continue reading “Composition over Inheritance, with JavaScript examples”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”
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”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”
I have ulte
rior motives.
Continue reading “Beezwax Web Team Code Review: a blog post with ulterior motives”
Fabio Bosisio from Beezwax demonstrates handling historical data in a Claris® FileMaker® solution, utilizing a combination of AWS services including AWS Serverless, AWS S3, and Amazon Athena’s Interactive SQL. Use cases include archiving, data mining, and reporting.
Continue reading “FM-DiSC: Handling Historical Data with FileMaker, AWS Athena, S3, Serverless”You’re invited to explore this demystify(FM-JS) blog post and download this demo file – as you embark on expanding your Claris® FileMaker® solutions into the vast and captivating realm of JavaScript.
Continue reading “demystify FileMaker and JavaScript [FM-JS]”This week we’re in Berlin… one of the stops on the Road to Claris Engage 2024 …gathering with the developer community, and highlighting innovation for the Claris FileMaker platform development. As conference speakers at dotfmp Berlin (June 1-3), Christos Savva, Fabio Bosisio and Vince Menanno from Beezwax present three sessions:
FileMaker 2023 introduces Perform Script on Server with Callback, a new asynchronous method to execute scripts with FileMaker Server. Now we have a way for FileMaker Server to execute another script, a “Callback” script, when one script is done processing via Perform Script on Server. It’s like calling your virtual assistant and instead of waiting on the phone for 5 minutes for info, they basically call you back when they are ready with an answer.
The end result is improved performance, better management of complex script workflow, enhanced user experience, and new possibilities for handling integration with APIs, email and services like Claris Connect.
Continue reading “FileMaker 2023 Perform Script on Server with Callback – Episode IV: Call Ya Later”
Problem Reports Dashboard
Track your progress while reducing problem code, and reducing technical debt.
Script Monitor
Create a visual and interactive representation of your script interactions, where you can monitor them and stay aware of their activities.
Search with LOgiCATOR
Locate InspectorPro 7 data with logical precision, including constrained and unconstrained finds within your solution analysis.
Security Perspective
Identify the privileges and security levels assigned to various user roles for each script.
Claris FileMaker has built-in methods to send email in HTML format, using SMTP protocols. I’ll cover what this means, how to use this functionality, and use FileMaker to send basic HTML email.
Continue reading “Native HTML Email in Claris® FileMaker®”
