I’ve been developing commercially on FM since the early nineties. I have reached a point where I feel I need to explore other options because of many of the same reasons mentioned here. In particular, the lack of communication and clarity in what the future holds with FM. And also the lack of innovation on the platform, in particular from the developer standpoint.
I must say that after reading thru quite a few of the entries and replies as well as the friendly tone, you guys are an informative breath of fresh air.
I’ve been wanting to develop a web app that is a job manager for a service company - business to consumer.
I’m pretty excited about Xojo and look forward to diving in.
I was hoping that you might be able to help with some questions I have.
I intend to build a web-based app. that would serve many (500?) different users.
Will Xojo be able to support multiple users? (I think yes, but I wanted to ask)
Can Xojo send timed reminder emails and or texts?
Is it possible to run a simple inventory system in Xojo?
Is it possible to upload a pdf via the front-end UI?
Can a PDF be generated from a form that’s been completed on the web? (end user completes a form and then gets an email confirmation of the form being received with a pdf attachment of what he filled out.
Hi Rene and welcome! Many of us have done work with Filemaker in the past and all of us have been new to Xojo at some point as well; you’re in good hands!
Bye the way, the answer to all your questions is “yes”. Hope that helps!
Hi @Rene_Kropf, I am diving into learning dev work with Xojo for all the same reasons you cited.
There are a couple of standard UI things I am exploring, like a multi-selection listbox and how to implement it in Xojo. Will be a learning curve and an interesting time.
Hi Rene - welcome to the group. I used FileMaker for years before looking for an alternative due to the ridiculous licensing changes a few years ago.
Xojo is more than capable of doing what you want - yes it can be a little more involved but as long as you have some development experience you should be fine. I love the flexibility a true development tool provides rather than the limited scripting language in FileMaker.
More than happy to answer any questions you may have directly if required.
Might be a little slow to respond at moment as I just caught my first bout of Covid and to be honest it’s been much worse than I thought it would be despite being fully vaccinated and boosted.
Mark: “Might be a little slow to respond at moment as I just caught my first bout of Covid and to be honest it’s been much worse than I thought it would be despite being fully vaccinated and boosted.”
I wish you a speedy recovery.
Unfortunately, there is no way of knowing if one will get the strongest or the least possible disease. That is the risk. It only remains to hope that one the COVID doesn’t send to the hospital.
Thank you Mark. I recently watched a webinar put on by Claris announcing a new product called Claris Studio. Not much to say on it except that they plan on using web forms to collect data and pass that data over to FM. Prices are going up 30%!
And will include everything they make. If only the products commanded that type of cost level…
I hope your back to full health very soon and thanks again!
Xojo can definitely support multiple users. For a Web App, I would recommend designing the system to allow for multiple instances of the Web App, and using a load balancer, such as haproxy, to distribute users among the running instances. Haproxy takes a bit of learning, but it has been rock solid for us and can also simplify SSL Certificate handling (so that the Xojo Web Apps do not have to deal with it).
thank you for confirming. This is very exciting!