Product Reviews

Last but by no means least in the current series of software releases by FileMaker is FileMaker Pro 5.5 Unlimited. As before, Unlimited is half connection tool (for the user) and half licensing tool (for FileMaker).

For your £799 you get two CDs and a standard set of user manuals. The first CD is an installer for the FileMaker application, with the usual example files, templates and so on. The difference lies in the Web Companion plug-in. In the normal version you're limited to serving 10 unique IP addresses in a 12-hour period. So while it's a simple five-minute process to share your databases with other users on the company intranet, only 10 of them can access your database within the same 12-hour period. However, there's no limit to the number of IP addresses that can be served from your single copy of FileMaker.

Share options

Of course, given its ease of use, and excellent Web-sharing, you can see why Unlimited is so expensive. If it wasn't, FileMaker might find large sites replacing multi-seat licences of the standard database product with a Web-enabled Unlimited version, and as many copies of Internet Explorer as needed.

The second CD contains the Web Server Connector. The Unlimited application can be used as both a standalone database and Web server, or with a full version of FileMaker Server

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as part of a multi-user environment to provide Web access. However, the Web Server Connector allows your Web site to use a separate standard Web-serving application to host static pages, and source the results of any database queries from your copy of Unlimited.

Connect three

The Unlimited connector works with one of three named Web servers: the de facto standard Apache server running on Mac OS X; the Apache server running on Red Hat Linux, possibly with the Linux-compatible version of FileMaker Server 5.5; or Microsoft IIS 5. At the time of writing, it wasn't possible to test if Unlimited was still compatible with the enhanced Lasso-based tool in 4D's Webstar software.

If you want to run a Redundant Array of Inexpensive Computers (RAIC), you need to run Unlimited on OS X Server. Strangely, though, FileMaker prefers the array itself to be running on OS 9, or at least it recommends against using OS X machines for this purpose.

Confused? This is because the Web Connector is definitely an Unix-based application. Double-clicking the provided shell-script, or typing a couple of commands into a Unix console window, starts the Web Server Connector. However, from there you configure and control your RAIC using a standard Web browser.

As well as the Web Connector, the second CD includes the documentation for Claris Data Mark-up Language (CDML), which is used for custom FileMaker Web publishing, documentation and examples for creating XML. It also has a JDBC API-compliant driver that enables you to execute SQL statements on your FileMaker databases from Java applets on your Web page. c: via JDBC, XML, or CDML custom solutions through a third-party Web server; default solutions using FileMaker layouts; and even 'instant' Web publishing (although this won't work with the Web Connector). For the moment, Unlimited is the best way to publish your FileMaker data to large groups over the Web.