FileMaker Pro does not lend itself to modular development practices as easily as some other programming environments, such as Java, Javascript, or C, but we are still very fortunate to have a community-wide development effort towards a library of re-usable code modules at http://www.modularfilemaker.org.

We recently had to update a database for a client to synchronize with Google Contacts using Open Authentication 2.0, and were able to take advantage of an OAuth module uploaded by Jim Randell to save ourselves and our clients a significant amount of development effort.

In our weekly development meeting this morning, we reviewed another new module posted last month. It’s a FileMaker WebDirect module that allows for the creation of PDFs, a function not directly supported by WebDirect. I think this is going to be a module we’ll use to enable better reporting functionality in solutions we publish to the web via WebDirect.

If you haven’t looked into Modular FileMaker, you should check it out!

~John Newhoff