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 […]

This blog post is the first in a series about the FileMaker OData API, highlighting key features that make it an exciting addition to the Claris FileMaker platform.

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 […]

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.

We are pleased to release bBox version 0.96, with JSON processing via jq, Python 3 compile/run, and improvements supporting Zsh, cURL and Ruby. bBox is a free plug-in extending FileMaker on macOS to use Python, JavaScript, PHP, Ruby, AppleScript, C/C++, Bash/sh, XPath, and SQLite.

Windows Subsystem for Linux, or WSL for short, is a quite impressive piece of technology, and one of the best moves Microsoft could have made to attract developers. Particularly web developers.

We often think of nothing as, well, nothing. It’s when something doesn’t exist and therefore cannot be interacted with. So in our code, we try account for having nothing. No User? No problem. The Null Object Pattern is also an example of Composition over Inheritance.

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 […]

Inputting purchase orders or invoices in accounting systems can be quite a hassle for bookkeepers, accountants, data administrators or anyone who simply has the role of 'Inputter'. Each company may have its own invoicing theme and sometimes information is not always ready for easy input.

Ruby’s safe navigator operator “&.” isn’t inherently bad. In fact if you have something like “foo && foo.bar” in your code, Rubocop will admonish you for not using safe navigation. However, using “&.” too often in your code is probably something to avoid.

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 […]