Reactor.

Beautiful, Dynamic Interfaces

Since 2007, Reactor has offered the best way to integrate JavaScript and the web viewer into your FileMaker solutions, allowing developers to leverage beautiful, dynamic interfaces from the web world, right in FileMaker layouts.

While you can now do a lot of what Reactor does in FileMaker 19 without a plugin, we’re still updating and supporting it because Reactor provides a deeper level of integration and provides the means to bundle up all your resources as one convenient bundle, including images.

Now Free!

What’s more, we revamped the editing tools and are making the whole kit-and-kaboodle available for free and downloadable right here, right now —

Download Reactor v6.2

There's no need to register but we have a mailing list for news and announcements:

Ongoing Support

FileMaker's built in Javascript tools now mean you don't really need Reactor for most embedded interactive web viewers.

However we know FileMaker solutions are long-lived and highly valuable to the organisations that depend on them — that is of course the part of the beauty of the platform.

There are still some times when Reactors deeper more interactive integration is invaluable — Reactor doesn't need to call scripts back and forth to get and set data: it reads and writes directly to the database tables.

So we have kept updating Reactor for compatibility for many years now, yet no longer ask any licensing fee — the product is completely free now.

We're happy to keep doing that for as long as it's needed, and would rather do so than just end of life and abandon support altogether, so if you would like to contribute we're taking donations to help offset that ongoing nominal support and welcome contributions at whatever level you feel represents the value to you.

Reactor Maintenance Contribution:

Current Compatibility:

Reactor is now compatible with Apple Silicon, and Windows 11:

Download Reactor Plugins v6.2.0

What’s Included

Reactor allows anyone with a bit JavaScript know-how to create a “Blackbox” — to encapsulate code from the web as a single installable control (a “Blackbox”) that gives the FileMaker developer a new user interface widget that’s simple and easy to use.

With the download above you get:

GNU GPLv2 license
Reactor v6 plugin
Reactor Builder
Sample Controls (aka “Widgets”)

Open

The Reactor Core database and the controls we’ve included are all open source — and you now have all the tools you need to get in and play around with them, recompile and create customised variants of our BlackBoxes. Some are available under GPL type licenses from the original library authors, which means you can use them for free in your own projects or license them from the library author for use in closed source products.

Support

With the plugin and tools now freeeee, our business model is paid support and consulting — we’re here to help with the tricky stuff.

Of course we’ll help you get up and running if for some reason Reactor isn’t working and we’re always keen to discuss ideas and point you in the right direction. We’ve got some online documentation too and will be blogging about some of our experiences with JavaScript in FileMaker.

And then if you’d like our help, either modifying the examples, building something new, or working out how best to implement them into your own solution then we have our crack team of devs at the ready for you: drop us a line and we’ll work a plan of attack for you.

More Information

You can learn more about Reactor from our product pages and online documentation:

First 10 Years of Reactor

When FileMaker first introduced the Web Viewer control we figured that it was much more than just a nifty way to see a web page in the middle of your FileMaker layout. In fact, the web viewer gives us the whole set of web technologies right there in our FileMaker layouts: that means you can use JavaScript, HTML and CSS to build user interface controls that do things we often can achieve with FileMaker's standard layout elements.

That's incredibly powerful if you know what you're doing with JavaScript and HTML, but most FileMaker developers don't want to go there... so we built ready made "Blackbox" — the Gantt Charts and Calendars proved incredibly popular. Reactor provides an easy way to drop in these ready made controls and integrate them with your database. No need to create arrays to pass data to a web viewer widget; no need to call back to FileMaker with a URL: Reactor controls (or BlackBoxes as we like to call them) read and write data in the database itself.

The current version of Reactor continues to work just great with those old Blackboxes, though at some point the JavaScript may break.