As an introduction, we’re a small, specialty discovery chemical company - custom chemicals for bio-tech, medical research, drug discovery, etc.
We’re currently utilizing a filemaker solution - Server 5 running on Red Hat Linux, Filemaker 5.5 Pro as clients. We typically have 15-20 connected clients during the course of the day.
Currently, we run our customers, orders, inventory, chemist notebooks, PO’s, supplies, and several other small misc. databases on this server - 110 files in all (almost at Server 5’s 125 file limit).
We feel we’ve outgrown the Filemaker solution - especially as 7 is not supported on Linux yet and we’ve been watching and talking with them for over a year with no progress towards that.
Also, we have been severly limited by Filemaker 5’s export/import of images and other filetypes - some projects frustrated completely by unworkability of container fields - ie, desktop publishing’s ability to utilized ODBC, but filemakers inability to export container via ODBC or to filesystem.
So, we’re considering a move to an SQL solution with Servoy as an application server.
If anyone could comment on these basic scenarios and let us know if any clash with Servoy’s current development state:
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Permissions to restrict editing to owners of the record - we’d like to combine all chemist notebooks into 1+ table, tagging records by chemist ID and creating views so that a logged in chemist sees and can edit his own records, and can view and “copy” another chemists notebook record into his own (ie, one chemist creates a batch, another will copy this record into his own for a similar batch being synthesized). So, data will reside in common tables, but records would need to have permissions set by owner/creator of the record.
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Our current Filemaker solution works well to hold chemical data - specifically ISIS draw sketch files of the molecules - .skc format. We could also use a ChemDraw format, but Filemaker crashed when using these. These are created in an outside app by R & D, and dropped into a container field . They are seen visually in filemaker, and can also be activated and edited as needed - or manually saved to a filesystem for use in other apps - creating a portable chemical catalog (ISIS\Base, etc.) It does NOT however, allow anything but manual export of these files - container field limitations.
Is Servoy capable of displaying these molecular sketch files? In an “OLE” fashion? I’ve noticed that PDF’s can be displayed with the use of a bean someone wrote, how difficult would it be to support this feature through a plug-in or similar?
There is a JavaBean for ChimePro (MDL’s plug-in to display ISIS data and structures in HTML) - anyone have any experience integrating this with Servoy?
- We also use Filemaker to layout and print content pages of our catalog - ie, specific layout for the section, print the RAW listings with catalog data, pricing, chemical structure (from the ISIS skc in the container field), and such. These raw pages are then fed into several PDF processors to apply page numbers, headers, etc., and finally compiled into the final catalog.
How difficult is precise layout control in Servoy? As a scenario, we’d need to control the size of the printed pages, l/r page margins, gaps and spacing, etc.
We’d like to consider moving to a full DTP solution that would grab the info from our database. In this regard, Servoy would not have to act as a “publisher”, but can it be queried by such as Adobe InDesign natively (to take advantage of calculations via Servoy, etc. not necessarily in the database and therefore not possible to import into InDesign via direct ODBC connection)?
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Also, we’d love to be able to use the MySQL database already built into our Red Hat server (dual CPU, plenty of ram, RAID, etc.). This server also acts as a limited fileserver, Filemaker server (not if servoy becomes our solution
), and internet gateway. How resource intensive is the Servoy Server component?
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Looking at other posts, it seems the developer and server components must be installed together - but we’d want only the server to run on the Red Hat box, while Servoy developer runs when needed on an XP box. How difficult is it to seperate those functions to two computers?
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Lastly, IT resources are limited to 1 - myself. I have:
Good DB experience - MySQL, FileMaker, Access, SQL etc. -
Ok programming skills - Basic, Fortran, PHP, Javascript (mostly web based), no Java yet.
Developed and/or configured and integrated several DB/web/app solutions from web apps (PHP, MySQL), to manufacturing DB utilizing Remote MS Access databases, to Filemaker, and a few others.
I’m going to download and look at the latest release, but what level of expertise is required to truly utilize Servoy? A full-time programmer is not in the budget, and a solution must be set-up in- house with limited expenditure on outside help (paid help that is ).
Any answers, comments, insight into any of the above would be appreciated. We’re truly interested in Servoy, but not being familiar with it other than what we’ve read, its difficult to see if it will fit our requirements.
Thank you for any information,
Nolan M.
FSCI