|||| re: Advanced has been discontinued
I can’t believe nobody has corrected you yet… Advanced hasn’t gone away at all, it just that they’re no longer making it a separate product. Not everyone needs the functionality that Advanced provides, specifically the script debugger and other such developer tools. Those are now turned on with a checkbox in the preferences.
In reference to the run-times we used to be able to create, we have known for 10 years that those were on the way out and it took them this long to finally pull that trigger. I feel for people who had built a business on that model, but frankly you’ve had plenty of time to work out what’s next since we’ve known it was a deprecated feature. I never used it myself, but I saw the appeal. I wonder if the Webdirect feature is seen as a way of deploying Filemaker apps to someone who doesn’t want to install a Filemaker client?
The cloud servers from Claris is a service that is actually comparable to buying server space from some of the various FM hosting companies. While you can host your files on your own server, you’ll need licensing to accomplish it… that cost is built in to the subscription cost whether you use Claris’ cloud offering or FMP Host. In the latter case, you can bring your own license but if you don’t have one, they’ll happily add the cost to your monthly number.
The cost of Filemaker licenses and server has long been a subject of debate among people who want their software to be cheap and well-supported. Obviously those two ideas are not possible in the same product. In the 30 plus years I’ve been working with Filemaker, I can assure you I’ve never stopped looking for something better. I’ve looked at MANY alternatives and haven’t found anything that measures up in terms of pure power and speed of development. Coupled with the vast number of protocols and techniques supported, Filemaker Pro is one of the best tools out there. When you consider that the cost of a project is overwhelmingly the hours of labor it takes to build a solution and not the cost of the platform itself, it’s easy to see that while you could just build something amazing using a combination of free tools like javascript, PHP, and MySQL, I assure you, it will take many times the hours to do so. I continue to use the platform because it makes economic sense to do so, but when someone builds a better tool for building business systems that can connect to the web services we increasingly depend on - you can bet I’ll be signing up for it.