To the uninitiated, this may look merely like a simple Web form, but to the true FileMaker aficianado it's the blessed return of CDML.

About ten years ago, Claris Corp. unveiled their first officially sanctioned method for publishing FileMaker data on a website. It was called CDML for Claris Dynamic Markup Language. Simple and inexpensive to implement, CDML was embraced by thousands of FileMaker customers, many of whom continue to use it to this day. Yet within days of Claris’s reorganization into FileMaker Inc., plans were being drawn up to retire CDML and its companion authoring tool, Claris Home Page. The death blow came with FileMaker 7, which dropped support for CDML.

After failing to convince anybody that their XSLT technology is the way you want to build database-driven websites, FileMaker has announced its intention to support good ol' garden-variety PHP. But something happened on the way to this party. A company called FMWebSchool has come out with a product called Black Belt that exploits PHP and FileMaker 8’s XML capabilities to let developers continue developing in CDML with just a few code changes.

But PHP is so much better, isn’t it? Well, maybe it is, but for all those CDML sites out there that are working just fine, Black Belt gives administrators a path to FileMaker 8 without requiring a total rewrite of their website.

Sounds pretty cool to me - but then, I'm a FileMaker geek (and proud of it).