Graphic Arts: Home Page 3.0 serves databases

MacWeek, March 23, 1998 by Sean Wagstaff

Despite Claris Corp.'s recent reorganization as FileMaker Inc., Home Page 3.0 isn't homeless - the product is under the corporate roof of FileMaker. Among Version 3's new features, most important is its capability to build FileMaker Pro 4 database forms as HTML documents. While Home Page is aimed at small-business, education and home users, the FileMaker capability may make it interesting to some high-end sites that use FileMaker Pro databases.

Home Page 3, which sells for $99, lets you preview and design frames on screen with ease. Its design interface is simple; we were able to settle right into building sites.

At less than one-third the price, Home Page lacks many of the features that make NetObjects Fusion and GoLive Systems Inc.'s CyberStudio so powerful for creating visually complex layouts. Most noticeably, there are no layout grids. Admittedly, grids, which are simply cleverly disguised nested tables, can lead to bloated HTML, but they're great in moderation for solving tricky layout problems. On the other hand, Home Page has an excellent table-building tool. You can quickly construct tables with varying sized and colored cells that can be pressed into service as bare-bones grids when needed.

Home Page lacks a specific palette of drag-and-drop design elements, but you can create your own libraries and stock them with favorite page elements that you can drop into pages. For power builders, Home Page lacks support for cascading style sheets, WebObjects and dynamic HTML, which places it back from the front lines of technology.

Home Page, like many other WYSIWYG Web-page editors, commits the peccadillo of including some dead-weight, Claris-specific custom tags in final HTML, such as: . Fortunately, you can disable this feature in the preferences if you prefer standard HTML output.

FileMaker partner

Although FileMaker 4 lets you publish databases on the Web without Home Page, an HTML editor is needed to customize the HTML query and report forms that FileMaker supplies. Home Page is the only HTML editor we've seen that offers an easy-to-use interface for editing FileMaker forms or creating them from scratch. To publish databases on the Web, FileMaker Pro must be running on the Internet or an intranet on a dedicated server.

Home Page's form building is very good, not surprisingly, given FileMaker's excellent record in this regard. You can quickly and easily build custom forms on Web pages by dragging well-documented tags from a Library window. A Home Page Assistant will automatically set up required links to the FileMaker database (which must be available online as you work). You can edit these links later to connect to a copy of the database at a different Internet Protocol address, if necessary.

If you're afraid to dirty your hands, an Assistant will build a complete FileMaker-based Web site according to your input to simple questions and dialogs. All of the Assistants are good; we were able to quickly build a functional, good-looking school site and a frame-based site.

We encountered a bug in the FileMaker Assistant IP dialog box, however: The "This Computer" button caused Home Page to crash every time we clicked it, but when we entered the address manually everything worked fine. (FileMaker could not reproduce this but suggested the problem might be an extension conflict.) Another bug was the inexplicable inability of the program to display JPEGs or even recognize their sizes, although this problem later disappeared for unknown reasons.

Home Page's site management is minimal for all but the most basic sites. A Site Description window displays all the files contained in a site folder, and a menu command lets you verify links. You can save the Site Description and reload it, but the actual HTML files are unaltered. A Consolidate command copies all selected files and folders in the description into a common location. The program handles simple FTP uploads with ease, but it has no provisions for multiple server sites or collaborative work, and it has few production-oriented options for specifying what gets uploaded. High-end Web designers may prefer to use Home Page as a FileMaker form builder and manage and design parts of their Web site with other tools.

Conclusions

Home Page 3 works well for its core audience. For higher-end users who publish FileMaker 4 databases, it's an excellent HTML form-building tool, although power users will probably limit it to supplementing a more robust design and site-management application. The combination of Home Page and FileMaker is a powerful, easy-to-use solution with an attractive price.

FileMaker Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif., can be reached at (408) 987-7000 or (800) 544-8554; http://www.filemaker.com.

Home Page 3.0 uuuu

FileMaker Inc. List price: $99*

Hits: FileMaker HTML form building; Home Page Assistants; tables and frames; library for storing elements; easy to use.

Misses: No grids; no DHTML or cascading style sheets; minor bugs; limited site management.

*Upgrades, $49; $49 rebate for Home Page 3 owners buying FileMaker 4 ($199).