Joel:

I worked with a large accounting firm that used Filemaker for some in-house applications a couple of years ago. We rewrote some of the Filemaker applications in VFP. I was told that they had originally picked Filemaker because they could run the same code on Mac and Windows platforms, and also because "non-programmers could program in it." Apparently this was seen as a good thing (g).

I never really worked with it myself, but I spent a lot of time watching users in Filemaker apps so we could port the functionality to VFP, and they seemed to be more like spreadsheets with embedded macros, as opposed to stand-alone applications. I don't know if that's inherent in Filemaker or just the way these particular systems were put together. Two things I found pretty annoying were some inconsistencies in the way Filemaker exports data to a comma-delimited format (we had to write some PRG's to import this data into VFP, rather than using APPEND FROM XXX TYPE DELIMITED) and the repeating-fields concept, which as somebody else pointed out in this thread encourages some pretty bad design decisions.

I have to admit that the cross-platform aspect worked reliably, but overall it didn't appear to be a robust development environment.

- Doug