In less than a week (as of Monday, July 30), I will work with FileMaker developers to learn, or get started learning JavaScript. I can’t wait. While I’m nervous about it, I’m also pumped that we get to talk the power of JavaScript and the power of the web viewer. It’s been my life’s goal (for the past 4 or so years) to get FileMaker folks excited about using JavaScript. We get to take another step in that direction. JavaScript is easy, it is powerful, and it is part of native FileMaker.

If you’ve not yet registered up for the training day (an additional cost), I encourage you to do so. I know it’s an investment. So to make sure your return will be adequate, I’ve described in pretty minute detail what we will do during the morning (there are other great sessions in the afternoon). You can check out the outline here. And you can review this video.

The Highlights

On our minds

As we wrap our brains around JavaScript, we’ll keep in mind two questions:

    1. How does our current understanding of FileMaker help us learn JavaScript?
    2. What are the benefits to using JavaScript in our FileMaker development?

In education, these are called “Essential Questions”. These are vital mainly to our adoption of JavaScript as a viable tool in our FileMaker development, and they keep us grounded. As cool and powerful as JS is, we need to remained focused on our client’s data and custom app and needs.

Hands-on

We will spend most of the time in the session:

  • Working with pure JavaScript. We’ll write little functions that accomplish something for data presentation in FileMaker or data manipulation.
  • Exploring how to set up using JavaScript in any environment, for any custom app.
  • Implementing and customizing current JavaScript libraries out there for our use.

I’ve got quite a few files for us to work with. Here’s a few screenshots.

We will spend a lot of our time in here. writing functions that display our data in interesting ways.

We will spend a lot of our time in here. writing functions that display our data in interesting ways.

This file is a reference for what is known about the web viewer object

An example integration we’ll implement.

Join the JavaScript revolution

I encourage you to sign up for this training session. The more FileMaker developers that know and use JavaScript, the more the movement grows and the more awesome custom apps get delivered to clients.

Join me August 6, 2018 at 8:30 a.m. at DevCon 2018 to begin the JavaScript journey.

-Jeremy