Exceptionally Uncaught

This morning I was thinking about a couple of random projects I've been working on lately, and something occurred to me. At my last job, we used a product called FileMaker Pro to make our solutions.

Yes yes, get the laughing over and done with Grant and Stilly. Finished? Good.

For anyone who doesn't know, FileMaker is a database building package. In a lot of ways it's like MS Access - it's meant to make building an database application quick and easy, but in a lot of ways it goes well beyond what Access offers. You could build an entire application in FileMaker that didn't have anything to do with a database if you wanted (sure, it would suck, but you could do it).

The tools on offer could be pretty limiting - for example there wasn't native SQL support until version 7 (which came out at the beginning of 2004). But one of the things I always enjoyed about my old job was trying to do something specific with the limited tools that were available. It wasn't so much a case of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail" but more how do you use a hammer to cut a piece of wood in half. All programming has an element of that - you often have to take the existing tools to build what you actually need - but this was like being the MacGyver of software development.

I think it was Grant who was impressed that a client was seeing TRIM as an engine rather than a solution on it's own. It occurred to me this morning that I've only ever seen it that way.