Custom Web Publishing Versus Instant Web Publishing

If you've read about Instant Web Publishing already (in Chapter 21), you'll be aware that the IWP capabilities of FileMaker 7 represent a big advance over those in previous versions. The advance is so significant, in fact, that you might wonder whether IWP would suffice for all your Web publishing needs. It certainly seems simpler than working with a lot of XML and XSL data files.

But CWP has a number of important advantages over IWP. Here are some of the most significant ones:

• IWP works very hard to replicate the look and feel of your FileMaker layouts, so it is guaranteed to work with only a few browsers (Internet Explorer, as well as Safari 1.1 or better on Mac OS 10.3). By contrast, if you are publishing XML data as HTML, you can create HTML that is compatible with as wide (or narrow) a range of browsers as you choose.

• If you are converting previous solutions that were written in CDML, FileMaker offers a conversion path from CDML to FileMaker 7's CWP, via the CDML Conversion Tool that is discussed later in this chapter.

  For more on converting from CDML to CWP, see "The CDML Converter," p. 722 , later in this chapter.

  
  

• With CWP, it's straightforward to integrate FileMaker data with other Web sites, or provide FileMaker data to others in the form of a Web service. CWP makes a strong distinction between the raw data (which is returned as XML) and the final presentational form (which can result from applying an optional XSLT stylesheet). By contrast, in IWP, data and presentation are combined in a way that makes it all but impossible to use the data itself in other contexts.

• CWP is best for sites that need to conform to the conventions of the World Wide Web. IWP presents data in a FileMaker-driven way: It's fairly easy, using IWP, to reproduce a fairly complex FileMaker layout on the Web, but it would be quite difficult to, for example, display a set of search results in a two-column list, or break a large set of search results up into multiple results "pages" ”both of which are common presentation styles on the Web.

• IWP has a number of built-in limitations. For instance, it cannot reproduce FileMaker's Preview mode, so it can't be used to display subsummary reports on the Web. Also, the IWP list and table views are limited to displaying 5 and 20 records at a time, respectively. These are limits that CWP can overcome .

In general, IWP is best for making some portion of the functionality of an existing FileMaker database accessible to remote users. IWP's chief strength is in bringing the FileMaker experience into a Web browser. The most likely targets for this technology are remote users of a FileMaker system who may not be able to be in the same building or same site as the server, but require ready access. This is likely to cater to a relatively small group of users (hundreds, say, rather than the thousands and tens of thousands that a public Web site can reach).

CWP, on the other hand, is best when FileMaker data needs to be presented in a "non-FileMaker" style, either as familiar-looking Web pages or in some other text-based form. It enables you to make FileMaker data available over the Web as raw XML, to integrate FileMaker data into an existing Web site, or to build a new Web site around FileMaker data while preserving all the conventions of Web presentation.