United Palestinian Appeal (UPA), a client close to my heart, is a Washington, DC based non-profit dedicated to alleviating suffering in Palestine. The organization has been performing difficult, and often thankless, work for over 30 years. As a good friend of mine who works at UPA once told me: everyone says they want to help Palestine, but nobody wants to file. Recently, UPA hired a new executive director -- a retired college professor and former UPA volunteer -- Ghassan (GJ) Tarazi.

GJ has been a pleasure to work with and is traveling to the Gaza strip later this week to promote UPA's University Scholarship and Emergency Relief programs, in part by ensuring they have internet access. In an initiative begun by their former director, Samer Badawi (now with the World Bank), I am pleased to announce that UPA will, for the first time in its history, accept scholarship applications and proposals for emergency relief funding over the internet. (These are private websites so I can't provide links.)

This seemingly minuscule change will save literally hundreds of hours of tedious work a year. Now the staff will be able to spend time ensuring that money is well spent by reviewing applications instead of doing data entry with applications. Just as importantly, less money will be spent on data entry. Think about it: high school students in the devastated Gaza Strip applying for college scholarships online, instead of by paper, will actually create the funds to send more of them to college. That is the kind of result that makes me proud of Inner File and the work we do.

The technical details

UPA uses a FileMaker database, built by yours truly through my super cool company Inner File Software, and hosted by FM Gateway. FM Gateway is run by FM Web School, a company based in Florida and dedicated to hosting FileMaker databases and helping their clients get those databases on the web. I have used their FileMaker hosting for a couple years (it rocks) and read most of their books. I don't like their books, as they are poorly written and written for beginners, but they are the only books out there on FileMaker/web integration.

FM Web School offers a Dreamweaver plugin, FM Studio. At this year's DevCon (which, regrettably, I missed), FM Web School released the second generation of FM Studio: FM Studio Pro. I am in the middle of a number of FileMaker/web projects, so I decided to purchase the software and try it out. I will likely post a further review of FM Studio Pro (I need to quit blogging and finish up the testing before GJ heads to Gaza), but I will start by saying that, after maybe two dozen development hours,

I have mixed feelings. I have a lot of experience with Dreamweaver plugins, having used MX Kollection, now the recently discontinued Adobe Dreamweaver Developer Toolbox, for years. I also currently use a fair number of WebAssist plugins. All of my experience with DW plugins made it easy to learn FM Studio, but also highlighted how unrefined this plugin is. The menus need a lot of work and consolidation, almost no PHP can be edited through the plugin once written, and the code itself could be much better organized. The MX Kollection, which Adobe bought and destroyed, was as streamlined as I have ever seen these plugins, and FM Web School could perhaps explore some of their features, such as the NexTensio database management tools and the integrated authentication tools.

An issue worth mentioning is that I had no access to most of my other plugins while working on any PHP/FileMaker website. This is a potential issue for anyone who relies on DW plugins. Most of my plugins assume a PHP/MySQL website (DW forces users to decide by website) and few of them worked. Even the javascript tools, which have nothing to do with the server side scripting language.

But as I said, my thoughts are mixed. I probably saved 50% in development time (not kidding), although I have no idea how that will actually pan out when it comes to maintaining the code over years. And let's hope this plugin doesn't get bought and destroyed by Adobe after hundreds of developers, and thousands of their clients, become dependent on the plugin (as has happened twice before with me and DW plugins I purchased). There are a few neat tools in FM Studio Pro, and I particularly dig the portal tool shown in this cheesy video:

And my conclusion

I already decided to move away from Dreamweaver plugins, in favor of open source web development software, Drupal in particular, before purchasing this plugin. FileMaker is a unique tool in my toolbox that I have no plans to give up and, as of yet, it doesn't talk to Drupal. Coding by hand does take a fair amount of time so I will use FM Studio Pro for the foreseeable future, at least for some of its tools. I will, however, carefully ensure that my code is easy to edit without FM Studio Pro in case I decide (or am forced) to choose another tool.

How to organize and edit code written by FM Studio is the likely topic of a future post. I don't mean for this posting to sound harsh in my review of FM Studio and comparing the affordable FM Studio to the most sophisticated (and expensive) PHP/MySQL plugins is probably unfair. All in all, FM Studio is a pretty good tool and most importantly, it does what it promises: quickly, and relatively easily, allows people to build FileMaker powered database web applications. And, much like their books, FM Web School is the only game in town for FM Dreamweaver plugins.