JavaScript and FileMaker

FileMaker is a powerful and rapid application development tool, but like any tool, it is really good at some things and less well suited for others.

Fortunately, FileMaker gives us a number of tools for extending its capabilities. The ability to use third party plugins (360Works, MonkeyBread, etc.) is a good example, but we’ve also found JavaScript to be a very useful tool for broadening FileMaker’s capabilities in many areas.

With the webviewer object in FileMaker, we have the extremely flexible option of using Javascript to extend a given database's capabilities and functionality.

JavaScript is the most commonly used programming language to power dynamic web pages. It has a large developer community creating JavaScript libraries, available as open source tools, for various purposes.  Many of these can be incorporated into the design of a FileMaker database.

One recent example is a custom tagging system we created for an asset-tracking system developed for Pearl Jam Touring, Inc. For details on the code, as well as a demo file to play with, see Joe's recent blog post on hashtags.

In another example, Xandon recently used JavaScript to incorporate clustering and color-coding into a Google map for a different client. 

We can greatly expand the functionality of a database (as well as the cool factor) with the use of JavaScript.