Microsoft should buy or steal this technology, it is that good. As you can tell from my detailed description, this is the solution that I settled on for a client a couple of years ago. There is a learning curve, but you control the environment and you don’t have on-going service fees. They also have a dictionary based version that is entirely GUI for application building. It is a remarkably elegant solution that lets you do pretty sophisticated stuff with just xml files to define screens. If you can stand living on a MS platform, take a look at. Here is a mostly current roundup of providers to get you started. If you can accept the loss of control and on-going fees, consider a web based service provider such as zoho. Typically we have an old Access application that needs to be webified. This is a difficult problem that I have had with a number of clients. Did anyone ever create an open-source equivalent? A quick look around failed to spot one. I haven’t seen it since I had a review copy at VDM circa 2000. I wasn’t even aware that FileMaker was still being sold.

Lazarus could work, but again, the real question is what’s out there that a lot of people use so that expertise is easy to find. Access is not cheap, nor is Delphi, and few people are learning Delphi anymore. I used to do things like that in Delphi, and have done simple apps for local tables in MS Access. The database itself must reside on a server, accessible over the Internet from the front end, which will be on laptops and/or desktops. Again, 300-500 records is probably as many as the main table will ever need to hold. There is a need for a certain amount of scripting in addition to table indexes and relationships. There are eight or ten tables, depending on how you slice up the database. The number of records in typical use is not high from what I can tell, fewer than three hundred in the largest table. The catch is this: They want it to be built with something cheap (ideally open-source) and widely used, so that one person isn’t stuck supporting it forever.

Some folks I know are asking me something I can’t answer: What are people using these days to build small-scale client-server GUI front ends? They have an app created with FileMaker Pro years back that they want to re-create.

Open source filemaker pro alternative