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.

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Claris Product Roadmap 2023 – Streamlining FileMaker Solutions

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.

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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 2023

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.

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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.

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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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Beezwax Sponsors EngageU: The Biggest Claris® FileMaker® Developer Conference

Christos Savva and Vince Menanno Present Rapid Serverless Integrations and FileMaker Native Script Transactions

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!

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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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Rome FileMaker® Week: Docker, Node-RED, Native Script Transactions and a Chatbot

Vincenzo Menanno and Fabio Bosisio from Beezwax present at Rome FileMaker Week.

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:

  • Local FileMaker Development with Docker and Node-RED
  • The New Horizon: Native Script Transactions in FileMaker
  • Chatbot
Continue reading “Rome FileMaker® Week: Docker, Node-RED, Native Script Transactions and a Chatbot”

Apple WWDC 2022 and beyond

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.

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Highlighting Tableau Certification at Beezwax

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.

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System for Success: Atomic Design for Google Display Ads

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.

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bBox v0.99 Integrates Claris FileMaker with JavaScript, Python 3 and Supports M1 Apple Silicon

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.

About bBox Plug-in For FileMaker

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:

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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.

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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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FileMaker Performance on Apple M1 | Astounding!

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!

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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.

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OData for FileMaker – New Player in an Old Game

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.

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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.

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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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Using REST and cURL with FileMaker’s Data API

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!

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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.
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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.

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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.

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

I have ulteI want you hacking, at Beezwaxrior motives.
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FM-DiSC: Handling Historical Data with FileMaker, AWS Athena, S3, Serverless

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.

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demystify FileMaker and JavaScript [FM-JS]

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.

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dotfmp: Python + Claris® FileMaker® | Historical Data & AWS Athena/SQS/S3 | UX & DX for Great Solutions

Christos Savva, Fabio Bosisio and Vince Menanno from Beezwax present at dotfmp Berlin, 2023.

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:

  • Enhancing FileMaker with Python
  • What do you do with all this historical data in your app? [AWS Athena Interactive SQL / Serverless / S3 with FileMaker]
  • Elements for Building Great Solutions [FileMaker UX & DX]
Continue reading “dotfmp: Python + Claris® FileMaker® | Historical Data & AWS Athena/SQS/S3 | UX & DX for Great Solutions”

FileMaker 2023 Perform Script on Server with Callback – Episode IV: Call Ya Later

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.

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Videos: Improving Your FileMaker Code with InspectorPro 7

Illustration of a man sitting on a sofa

Five Ways InspectorPro 7 Can Improve Your FileMaker Code

Want better collaboration, performance and insight for your FileMaker development teams? With InspectorPro you can leverage advanced diagnostics, perform in-depth analysis, and gain insights with new visualizations.

Check out these videos from InspectorPro creator & Beezwax Chief Innovation Officer, Vince Menanno.

 

 

Problem Reports Dashboard

Track your progress while reducing problem code, and reducing technical debt.

 Watch now 

 

 

 

Script Monitor

Create a visual and interactive representation of your script interactions, where you can monitor them and stay aware of their activities.

 Watch now 

 

 

 

Search with LOgiCATOR

Locate InspectorPro 7 data with logical precision, including constrained and unconstrained finds within your solution analysis.

 Watch now 

 

 

 

Security Perspective

Identify the privileges and security levels assigned to various user roles for each script.

 Watch now 

 

 

 

Advanced Information

Identifying indirection, scripts states and more.

 Watch now 

 

 

 

Special Offer

Book an InspectorPro consultation at a special rate.

 Book now 

 

 

Native HTML Email in Claris® FileMaker®

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.

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Web UI and JavaScript with Claris® FileMaker®

Alec Gregory from Beezwax presents at DIGFM & Bay Area FileMaker Developer Meetup.

Let’s talk about building web UIs and JavaScript functions using Claris FileMaker.

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The New Horizon: Script Transactions in Claris® FileMaker®

Script transactions in Claris FileMaker are finally here, but wait! Haven’t we done “transactions” in FileMaker for a long time? Yes and Yes. But script transactions are different and the main advantages, that I see, are the possibilities of simplifying code and improving solution performance. I’ll elaborate on these in this post. And, of course, there is also the inherent benefit of doing things transactionallyall or nothing is the law of the data.

Continue reading “The New Horizon: Script Transactions in Claris® FileMaker®”

Transacting Transactions in Claris FileMaker

Vince Menanno from Beezwax presents at FMDiSC (FileMaker Developers in Southern California).

You may have read on Claris’s blog that “Developers are excited to use Claris FileMaker 19.6!” As Vince Menanno from Beezwax said in an interview for that blog post:

“This FileMaker release is significant. There’s a possibility to make solutions run faster if you’re leveraging transactions, and for code to be more concise.”

– Vincenzo Menanno, Beezwax

So, let’s talk about Claris® FileMaker® and script transactions in FileMaker 19.6!

Continue reading “Transacting Transactions in Claris FileMaker”

Data Visualization in FileMaker Web Viewer

Alec Gregory from Beezwax presents at the Claris FileMaker for Research User Group.

Let’s talk about Claris® FileMaker® and data visualization with FileMaker 19 web viewer, and developing with open source tools!

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Finer Faster FileMaker Precision: Measuring How Long It Takes

I often like to measure performance, because I am curious if some small change can lead to subtle, or maybe not so subtle, improvements. For the longest time my Swiss Army knife for measuring Claris® FileMaker® performance has been:

Get ( CurrentTimeUTCMilliseconds )

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DIGFM December 2022 – Script Transactions in Claris FileMaker

Vince Menanno from Beezwax presents at DIGFM.

Let’s talk about Claris® FileMaker® and script transactions in FileMaker 19.6!

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