Valley Village, CA, August 30, 2010 -- Dracoventions announces the release of
2empowerFM Text Toolkit 2.2 with rewritten documentation and examples. Best
of all, this FileMaker(R) Pro and Server plug-in is now absolutely free, no
strings attached.
About Text Toolkit
2empowerFM Text Toolkit lets you to do just about anything you can think of
with text:
- Test if an email address looks valid
- Format digits into a phone number
- Capitalize sentences
- Turn HTML into plain text
- Do something with each word in a comma-separated list
- Examine each line of a FileMaker value list twice as fast as when using
FileMaker's MiddleValues()
- Hash a large piece of text down to a short signature for comparison to
other signatures or for safely-storing passwords.
- and on and on.
Most of these features are accomplished using the power of "regular
expressions" in Text Toolkit. Regular expressions are sequences of special
codes and "wildcard" characters that can be crafted to find almost any
pattern within text. A pattern can match an email, HTML tag, number, word,
and so on. Text Toolkit lets you search text for these patterns and
optionally replace them with other patterns.
Regular Expressions are everywhere.
You'll find something like regular expression search and replace in every
major piece of software that deals with text, from word processors to web
site editors - they're just that useful. While there is a lot to learn
before anyone can master regular expressions, Text Toolkit includes a guide
to get you started with the easier stuff. It will also point you to web
sites with tutorials, libraries of regular expressions, and
expression-building tools to make regular expressions easier to use and
understand.
Advanced regular expressions.
Text Toolkit integrates a third-party, Perl-compatible regular expression
engine that's fast and well tested. Even advanced features like equivalence
classes and Perl back-references are supported. Perl-like variables are
created for each matched group and iteration through multiple matches is
supported.
Hash text.
Text Toolkit also provides the power of "hashing". A hash is a relatively
short sequence of characters that represents a piece of text. Every piece
of text has its own hash that doesn't change unless the text changes.
Therefore, you can store the hash of one or more FileMaker fields to
determine when any of them have been altered. This can be used for security
or to determine when changed records in two databases need to be
synchronized.
Save passwords safely.
When a hash is "strong", it is virtually impossible to calculate what piece
of text it was created from. Therefore, if you store the strong hash of a
password instead of the password itself, it doesn't matter if the hash is
stolen from your database. A thief can't use a strong hash to determine the
password that created it.
Many hash methods.
2empowerFM Text Toolkit supports many hash methods: TR1, MD5, SHA1, SHA256,
and SHA512 (one of the strongest hashing methods available) and uses
well-tested, third-party hashing libraries. Hashes can be encoded in Base32,
Hex, or a Handwriting-safe series of characters.
How can all this be free?
- Because these features are so useful that we think they should be built
into FileMaker. Since they aren't, offering them in a free plug-in is the
next-best thing.
- Since these features are so useful, they have been made available in
other free plug-ins, so it's hard to charge even the low price we used to
ask for Text Toolkit.
- We hope you'll enjoy using Text Toolkit and will want to try out other
plug-ins in the 2empowerFM Family. We hope you'll tell your friends, too!
Other free plug-ins usually require the installation of complicated
frameworks like Java or PHP, or they may be buggy, missing features, or just
hard to use. Complicated frameworks can also pose security threats outside
of FileMaker, such as when a recent Java exploit allowed banner ads served
through otherwise-safe web sites to install malware on the machine of anyone
who viewed the ad (not even a click on the ad was necessary). Text Toolkit
is self-contained with nothing else to install.
Availability
2empowerFM Text Toolkit 2.2 is available immediately at
http://regex.dracoventions.com http://regex.dracoventions.com
About Dracoventions
Dracoventions is located in Valley Village, CA, and is focused on empowering
FileMaker(R) Pro and Server with innovative plug-ins that expand FileMaker's
abilities, create a better user experience, and save development time.
With over 25 years of software engineering experience, company founder Chris
Dragon was inspired by the business needs of his former employer to create
the seeds of what have become the 2empowerFM Family of FileMaker Plug-ins.
These plug-ins include Developer Assistant, Dialogs Unlimited, Hands-Free
Printer, Text Toolkit, and many others. These plug-ins are now available to
the world-wide FileMaker community at http://www.dracoventions.com
www.dracoventions.com .
Contact
Chris Dragon, Dracoventions Founder
Email: [log in to unmask]
Web: http://www.dracoventions.com http://www.dracoventions.com
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