Mike Ross leads a discussion on abstraction, what it is, when to use it and, perhaps more importantly, when NOT to use it. Ron Cates also demos some of his scripting to demonstrate his use of abstraction.

In July, Chris Irvine presented a broad introduction to several software architecture concepts to the Cincinnati and Indianapolis user groups. In this month's presentation, Chris will re-introduce the idea of a three-tier solution and then go deeper into practical use by stepping through some interactive demos. The idea of atomic transactions, with 'committing' or 'reverting' records, can be an important and useful platform feature to tame. It can help software to behave as users expect, and also maintain quality data in your records. One demo area will be a user-interactive transaction, and another will be in a UI-free approach.

Developers ranging from intermediate all the way up to expert will likely be able to take away some practical ideas that could be put to use inside their own solutions. This virtual meeting was very interactive with lots of questions and discussions.

While watching the July presentation is not a prerequisite, a recording is available on YouTube for those who are interested https://youtu.be/XMod98BkH50. Additional related background material includes a blog series, https://scalefm.com/2016/06/is-filemaker-acid-compliant-part1/

Chris Irvine is a Senior Technology Consultant and founder at Threeprong.com LLC, specializing in performance tuning, B2B integration, and custom workgroup solutions. His educational background is in Computer Science, with professional experience including management roles in multiple industries, numerous development and database environments, and over 15 years of experience with Claris FileMaker products and related technologies.

Additional material related to this presentation, including sample file and presentation slides, is available at
https://scalefm.com/2021/09/atomic-meet-tiers-at-kentuckiana-dev-group

Charles Delfs of Delfs Engineering in Toronto, Ontario, shows off FM Better Forms, his easy-to-use web front end creation application for FileMaker databases. FM Better Forms empowers FileMaker solutions to provide a much wider variety of services on the web faster and easier than other "custom web publishing" methods.

Christian Schmitz of Monkeybread Software recently took time out of his Austrian vacation to share with the Kentuckiana FileMaker Developers Group some examples of useful functions in his MBS FileMaker plugin.

Matt Navarre hosts his latest FileMaker Duel show. Topics, both mundane and epic get discussed and voted on. Sometimes topics go down with a whimper and sometimes topics start holy wars. But no matter what, you can't help but learn something you didn't know before. Watch the fun!

Building upon our look at the various hosting options available to FileMaker users last month, we have another take on hosting that you will want to hear. Former FileMaker, Inc. employee Bill Heizer, now with Soliant Consulting, introduces Mike Duncan, also of Soliant who shows how you can leverage Amazon Web Service's S3 storage for holding unlimited container data. Always good for a real info-packed presentation, Bill and Mike will cover a variety of use cases and the services offered by AWS S3 that can take them to the next level.

Also, this month, keeping in touch with our FileMaker Friends across the Atlantic, we will have HOnza Kudelka of 24U software, headquartered in Prague, Czech Republic, show off a free module his team put together that builds totally native bar codes on the fly in FileMaker. It will change your opinion of what can be done with custom functions forever.

Last month we heard Fabrice Nordmann drop some hints about a new service that his hosting company is pioneering, so we're bringing him back to headline this month's meeting and go into more detail about it. Spoilers: it involves better performance, more users and lower cost than has previously been possible.

From the left coast of the American continent we have Mike Ross, from some place called "Washington State," taking his presentation on the FileMaker-based document management techniques he has discovered over the years on the virtual road. We'll hear about the different ways that binary document formats can be stored and some practical tips how to leverage the tools in FileMaker to manage a large document repository.

From the left coast of the European continent, however, we have the ever-popular Fabrice Nordmann whose company, 1 More Thing, has offices in France and Belgium. Fabrice will be sharing his highly-recommended presentation "Things we do wrong in FileMaker." We are ready to be humbled by his admonitions, but it should still be very enlightening.

Jonn Howell discusses a recent solution he put together to meet some particularly unique demands for a large-ish FileMaker-using population he serves. Jonn has created a way for multiple windows to work smoothly with each showing a different record on the same layout. This needs to work efficiently for close to 300 users at the same time with no delays and no interference between users.

Jonn will walk us through how the need came about and how he solved it with some creative thinking. His solution involves several "tricks" that you will definitely find interesting and perhaps useful in your own solutions.

Michael Sloper and Jonathan Fletcher share their success with integrating the Quill javascript text editing library in a FileMaker web viewer and extending its usefulness within the Quill API and with additional tools.


Michael's blog post and demo file here:
https://www.sloperdata.com/demos

QuillJS downloads, guides and documentation:
https://quilljs.com

FileMaker Magazine's video and demo of converting HTML to PDF:
https://www.filemakermagazine.com/videos/converting-html-pdf

wkhtmltopdf tool mentioned in FileMaker Magazine post:
https://wkhtmltopdf.org