We’re excited today to announce that RESTfm has reached version 2.0. Although we haven’t previously spent much time talking about RESTfm, we’ve slowly been working on other tools that interact with it. In the coming days in the leadup to FileMaker DevCon, I’m going to go into more detail about our implementations of :
- PayPal Instant Payment Notifications to RESTfm
- FastSpring software Licence retrieval from RESTfm
- Doing a POST in the WebViewer in FileMaker Go to RESTfm
- Syncing from FileMaker Go to RESTfm via HTTP
Keep an eye on the blog here for more details about these.
2.0 Release
The 2.0 release had some big features we needed to help us build our sync framework, notably :
- The RFMelsePOST flag to allow us to do a single request for new or updated records.
- RFMappend for doing large data sets over a small GET connection.
- RFMfixFM01 to work around the way FileMaker handles encoded characters in InsertFromURL.
- A Field meta data flag so you can just retreive the field details without getting any records.
- Our new .simple format for easy to parse data inside FileMaker where there is no JSON or XML.
Plus a bunch of smaller things and bug fixes. All of the details are on the change log.
Upgrades
This is a free update to 1.0, and anyone who has an existing licence will be emailed a copy of the latest release shortly.
Our Sync Framework
We’ll be sending out a copy of our sync framework to people who own RESTfm 2.0. If you’d like to help us test and refine the sync before our final public release, please contact us.
Future
RESTfm at first seems like just a thing for WebServices. But when you realise how easy it makes data sending and retrieval, you immediately start finding other uses for it. Mostly what we’re seeing is that any small communication with our FMS box almost always defaults to using RESTfm to begin with. We keep finding new uses for it, and it’s becoming a very handy tool.