FMWebschool

This is an article from our newsletter, that I think will be interesting to many of you that work with FileMaker web publishing. I wont give away the surprise, but in our next issue, we will tell you how to speed up your pages and optimize your database. Enjoy! Join our newsletter

Overview

When web publishing with PHP and the FileMaker database, there are two predominant options on the market at this time: FX.php and the FileMaker PHP API. FX.php is an older third party library, that is compatible with FileMaker Server versions 6 and up, and is open source.

The FileMaker API is a proprietary library developed by FileMaker Inc and is compatible with FileMaker Server 9 and above. Both these libraries offer a fully functional interface to a FileMaker database and can be used very quickly in a PHP application, there are many reasons to use each one, and this document will focus on the performance aspect of each library.

Objective

Within the FileMaker community there is an ongoing debate on which library should be used, which one is faster, and what is going to be the long term winner in this “battle”.

This document attempts to place an unbiased perspective on the performance of each library in benchmark tests, and will aim to provide a reason for the differences that are found. In this first set of tests only the results are going to be presented, and a future document will follow with technical analysis as well as recommendations for performance enhancements.

Current Situation and Common Myths

Currently the accepted opinion within the community is that FX.php is the faster library. The advantages of the FileMaker API are generally cited as better code, and official endorsement by FileMaker Inc, as well as it being a developing technology with a lot of potential and a large budget behind it.

The degree to which FX.php is faster then the FileMaker API has been a hot topic, with approximations as low as a few percent to claims of FX.php being 7x faster – this benchmark attempts to put a more concrete number on this specific point.

Download the Documentation Here

Download our sample files

Join the forum discussing this benchmark test and ways to improve speed and optimization.

In Kindness
Stephen Knight
Ask me about FileMaker Hosting for Mobile Devices
http://www.fmgateway.com
800.353.7950

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 10:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.