I'd like to connect to a Filemaker database with PHP on a Linux server, but from what I've seen it seems very complicated, so I'd like to ask for suggestions on another solution to the problem.

We are building a web site for a customer that would like to publish information from their existing Filemaker database on the site, and also allow visitors to search the database. At first I thought they could just export to an XML document from Filemaker and upload it to the site, but when I looked at the resulting XML I just got dizzy. It's something called FMPXMLRESULT and the logic and structure is way over my head as I'm fairly inexperienced when it comes to XML.

Anyone have any suggestions for this scenario?

There may well be an ISP out there who supports FileMaker databasess natively. if no then you hgave several options

depending on how big the db is, and how much traffic you realisitcally expect then exporting the data to falt files may work.... wouldn't be my choice bt it may work

failing that it may make sense to export the data to a db that the ISP does support... in PHP you are virtually unlimited, but Im guessing the first choice would probably be MySQL, or possibly SQL Lite, which is bundled (IE FREE) in these days with most PHP5 installations. its quite a well trod path for SME's, maintaining the data in a file db like Access or Filemaker and the web sever uses MySQL

Id check to see if the Filemaker data is available trhough ODBC within PHP

Hello
It's now pretty easy to use Php and Filemaker.
You can host the fm db on our server (http://fmhost.net) and use your own linux box with the fmandphp class.

If you need help don't hesitate to contact us.

As a general note, you have 2 other hosts that i know of:
http://www.fmgateway.com
http://www.pointinspace.com

Your other choice is to of course host the database on your servers and the php pages on a normal provider.

Also, the OO API for FM 9 is actually quite comprehensive and straight forward -> Further, if you've ever used Dreamweaver to build MySQL sites, you'll find a plugin at http://www.fmwebschool.com that will behave in exactly the same way and write the bulk of your code for you in either the API or the somewhat more dated FX.PHP...