DevCon 2009: Day 3 Recap

This was the last day of DevCon 2009, and it was a short one. Here's a final recap...

My first session today was Geoff Coffey's "Practical Script Triggers." Geoff did a great job of showing us how we can very easily use script triggers to make big improvements to our solutions. His demonstrations included highlighting of the active record in list view, a technique for safely allowing a user from cancelling a batch process (and performing any necessary cleanup work), a cool way to implement the saving and cancelling of changes, a keyboard navigation system that allows users to type a few letters to jump to a record in list view, and much, much more. I attended a number of sessions on script triggers, and all of them were helpful. But Geoff's session stood out among them. I now understand why the other presenter's seemed to have stolen all of Geoff's material!

Next up was Richard Carlton's "Real World Examples of Using ESS." Richard explained how you can extend the functionality of OSCommerce (a popular open source ecommerce solution) with FileMaker using ESS to do things like manage products, generate reports, and so on. He also explained how you can use SASE ("Server Activated Script Execution") to import data from external SQL sources in batches during off hours. It's easy to extend his ideas to lots of other SQL-based solutions. I've been using ESS in similar ways since FileMaker 9 shipped, so none of the material was new to me. Regardless, it was great to learn how Richard and his team at Richard Carlton Consulting are using ESS in a variety of ways, and a good refresher on the topic. And as I said about Lee Snover's "Advanced ESS Hands On" session from Day 1, it was encouraging to see so many people attend the seminar, because it seems to indicate that FileMaker developers are looking to use ESS to integrate with other SQL-based systems.

After lunch, Jon Thatcher presented the "Under The Hood" session, and this year's topic was FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Server Performance. Jon gave a lot of great information on things like indexes, value lists, and so on... I'm anxious to pull up his presentation from the conference CD and review it, because he gave tips that I think will have a fast, positive impact on the performance of some of the larger systems that I've developed.

And the final event was the "Closing Session." FileMaker Inc's Bill Epling gave us an interesting recap of where FileMaker Inc is financially (they're doing great, in case you're wondering), and then Ryan Rosenberg presented a recap of DevCon 2009.

DevCon 2009 was a great time, and in my opinion, a big success. I learned a lot, have a lot to think about, and met a lot of very nice people. But most importantly, I feel like I'm coming back from DevCon as a better FileMaker developer.

And I'm already looking forward to DevCon 2010, which will be held in... ?!? :-)