The FileMaker Web Companion was a plug-in that allowed FileMaker Pro databases to communicate with the web.
Introduced in the early days of the commercial internet, it transformed a computer running FileMaker Pro into a small web database server. A web browser could submit a request, FileMaker would process it, and the Web Companion would return the resulting page.
This was years before web APIs, cloud platforms, and low-code application builders became commonplace.
Bringing FileMaker to the early web
The Web Companion supported two complementary approaches.
With automatic web publishing, FileMaker could generate web pages from existing database layouts. This eventually became known as Instant Web Publishing.
Developers could also build their own HTML pages and use FileMaker’s CDML, or Claris Dynamic Markup Language, to communicate with the database. CDML tags described operations such as finding, creating, editing, or deleting records.
When a browser submitted the page, the Web Companion interpreted the request, asked FileMaker to perform the database operation, and merged the results into the returned HTML.
A database and web server on one computer
The Web Companion belonged to an era when a small organization might host a website directly from an office computer.
There was no requirement for a separate application server or complex development stack. FileMaker Pro, the Web Companion, a database file, and a collection of HTML pages could form a complete web application.
The architecture had obvious limitations in performance, security, availability, and scalability. Yet it made database-driven websites accessible to developers and small businesses that could not have built them using conventional server technologies.
An early low-code web platform
The Web Companion anticipated several concepts that later became central to web development:
- Connecting browser forms directly to structured data
- Generating dynamic pages from database records
- Reusing business logic across desktop and web interfaces
- Allowing non-specialist developers to publish database applications
- Providing both an automatic interface and a customizable one
In retrospect, it can be seen as an early bridge between desktop database development and the modern web.
From Web Companion to FileMaker Server
As web applications became more important, FileMaker’s publishing technology moved away from a desktop plug-in and into FileMaker Server.
Instant Web Publishing provided automatic browser access, while Custom Web Publishing introduced more capable XML and PHP interfaces. FileMaker WebDirect later delivered a richer reproduction of FileMaker custom apps in modern browsers.
The current platform now offers WebDirect, XML Custom Web Publishing, the FileMaker Data API, and OData.
Each generation is technically different, but all share part of the original Web Companion vision: making FileMaker data and workflows available beyond the FileMaker desktop application.
Remembering the Web Companion
The Web Companion would not be an appropriate foundation for a modern internet application. Its protocols and security assumptions belong to another era.
But it deserves recognition as a technology ahead of its time. It allowed FileMaker developers to create dynamic, database-driven websites when the web itself was still young.
At fmcloud.fm, we have worked with the FileMaker platform across these successive generations. That historical perspective helps us understand not only how current technologies work, but why they were created and which problems they were intended to solve.
