Business Solutions for Back Office and Web
BudiBase web portals
In recent years, I’ve build quite a few web portals for my customer’s customers and suppliers. With web portals, I mean giving access via a web browser to (some of the) information that is stored in my customers FileMaker databases. When these portals only needed to be accessed by a limited number of users, we often used FileMaker’s web direct. But when the data needed to be published to more than just a few external users, and therefore needed to be more scalable, we used AppDrag. AppDrag is still a very user friendly and fast web development platform, but the integration of data(bases) takes some more effort.
Recently, I discovered what is called ‘internal tools’. I then evaluated AppSmith, BudiBase and ToolJet, and although it took a little time to get used to, BudiBase is now my favourite tool for developing data centric web apps. You can use BudiBase’s cloud to host your apps, but there’s also an open source version that you can host yourself. I’ve actually got my own self-managed service up and running with elestio. Besides their own internal database, BudiBase can also access data from a large number of SQL databases and Rest API’s. I’m using n8n as an in between BudiBase and FileMaker’s Data API, but my preferred method now is to use MySQL to store the data that needs to be published via BudiBase. In order to get data to and from MySQL and FileMaker, I’ve build a tool that can create MySQL tables from FileMaker tables, and can also take care of pushing, pulling and even synchronizing the data. The advantage of this separated approach, is that there’s no direct external (web) access to your FileMaker data, and you can decide yourself which data is published. BudiBase’s Users system controls who gets access to your apps, and makes for smooth on-boarding. And last but not least, you can add your own datasources and components through plugins. More info on BudiBase.
Recently, I discovered what is called ‘internal tools’. I then evaluated AppSmith, BudiBase and ToolJet, and although it took a little time to get used to, BudiBase is now my favourite tool for developing data centric web apps. You can use BudiBase’s cloud to host your apps, but there’s also an open source version that you can host yourself. I’ve actually got my own self-managed service up and running with elestio. Besides their own internal database, BudiBase can also access data from a large number of SQL databases and Rest API’s. I’m using n8n as an in between BudiBase and FileMaker’s Data API, but my preferred method now is to use MySQL to store the data that needs to be published via BudiBase. In order to get data to and from MySQL and FileMaker, I’ve build a tool that can create MySQL tables from FileMaker tables, and can also take care of pushing, pulling and even synchronizing the data. The advantage of this separated approach, is that there’s no direct external (web) access to your FileMaker data, and you can decide yourself which data is published. BudiBase’s Users system controls who gets access to your apps, and makes for smooth on-boarding. And last but not least, you can add your own datasources and components through plugins. More info on BudiBase.
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Dick Honing |
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