Hi Lee,
Some more snippets about your points for you to review :
2> See this thread from Bob Cusick about recreating a FM contact Manager in Servoy : http://forum.servoy.com/viewtopic.php?t=2014
The Servoy version compared to FM is more or less indistinguishable from a GUI view and with the use of style sheets could make your Servoy solutions more consistent & rich !
3> FM7 uses non modal floating windows whereas Servoy currently can use what is termed ‘FormInDialogues’ which do allow you to show several forms simultaneously but they are modal in that you must complete your action in one form in order to return to a prior one - Pros and Cons are really down to how you need to have the data displayed
5> I think that you are referring here to the ability of FM7 to nominate a start row and a number of rows from that start point so that you can have several portals from the same relationship on a layout but have different record sets in each.
Servoy cannot do this as a native property of a portal object but you could probably use SQL queries and return your appropriate subsets in that fashion. Display then becomes dependent upon what you want to do with the different data sets !
MaJic Solutions is a contract developer and a ‘gun-for-hire’
We are proponents of the ‘best tool being used for the job’ and so there would not currently be a point in time when we could say that we would never use FileMaker and switch completely to Servoy !
We are driven by our clients’ needs
Servoy is a very powerful and very flexible addition to our armoury.
There are now many more opportunities for us to be able to say ‘yes’ with confidence to our clients and prospects when they have asked for particular types of functionality where FM would have left us wondering how it would be achieved !
If you come from a FM background then I would suggest that the learning curve is not steep in order to be using Servoy to a similar level as FM for ‘new’ projects.
Converting existing FM solutions into Servoy is a different matter altogether.
But, whether you convert to Servoy or to another application then the conversion would not be painless anyway !
My main piece of advice is to initially check out the FM conversion tutorial from Bob Cusick and get a feel yourself for how you may adapt to using Servoy as a tool.
Stay on this list as it is a great resource - one of the best lists that I have ever been on.
Experience for yourself how quickly the Servoy team can work on bugs and enhancements and how responsive they are to virtually any issue which is posted.
Remember that Servoy is a new product and is evolving as we read this and it is impossible for any current user to say what the future will bring as there is no real history yet to refer to !
You would need to quantify more your comparison criteria in order for you to know whether a ‘switch’ would be viable but there are many developers on this list who have done just that and they may hopefully add their comments to this thread.
Please post any more specific questions which you may have or feel free to contact me back channel
Cheers
Harry