Custom Web Publishing with XML and XSLT

Chapter 1
Introducing Custom Web Publishing
With FileMaker Server, you can publish your FileMaker database on the Internet or an intranet in these ways.
Instant Web Publishing: With Instant Web Publishing, you can quickly and easily publish your database
on the web. You don’t need to modify your database files or install additional software—with compatible
web browser software and access to the internet or an intranet, web users can connect to your database to
view, edit, sort, or search records, if you give them access privileges.
With Instant Web Publishing, the host computer must be running FileMaker Pro or FileMaker Server. The
user interface resembles the desktop FileMaker Pro application. The web pages and forms that the web user
interacts with are dependent on the layouts and views defined in the FileMaker Pro database. For more
information, see FileMaker Instant Web Publishing Guide.
Static publishing: If your data rarely changes, or if you don’t want users to have a live connection to your
database, you can use static publishing. With static publishing, you export data from a FileMaker Pro
database to create a web page that you can further customize with HTML. The web page doesn’t change
when information in your database changes, and users don’t connect to your database. (With Instant Web
Publishing, data is updated in a web browser window each time the browser sends a request to FileMaker
Server.) For more information, see FileMaker Instant Web Publishing Guide.
Custom Web Publishing: For more control over the appearance and functionality of your published
database, use the Custom Web Publishing technologies available with FileMaker Server. FileMaker Server,
which hosts the published databases, does not require FileMaker
Pro to be installed or running for Custom
Web Publishing to be available.
With Custom Web Publishing, you can:
1 Integrate your database with another website
1 Determine how users interact with data
1 Control how data displays in web browsers
FileMaker Server provides two Custom Web Publishing technologies:
1 Custom Web Publishing with PHP: Use the FileMaker API for PHP, which provides an object-oriented
PHP interface to FileMaker Pro databases, to integrate your FileMaker data into a PHP web application.
You can use PHP Site Assistant to generate a complete PHP website, or code PHP web pages yourself.
1 Custom Web Publishing with XML and XSLT:
1 Use XML data publishing to exchange FileMaker data with other websites and applications.
1 Use server-processed XSLT stylesheets to integrate any subset of FileMaker data into other websites,
with other middleware, and with custom applications. You can use XSLT Site Assistant to generate
XSLT stylesheets, or code the stylesheets yourself.