Code Generation Horror

Scriptcase 9 General
#1

I wonder how many of you (users) likes NetMake generated code. Form time to time when I look into the code I need blood pressure pills, but perhaps it’s only me…
Just wonder how many can tell without a dictionary what those lines mean, or better yet translate this piece of pseudo-code into “real code” ?
For the company who’s intent is to sell software internationally this type of practice is just simple stupidity!

if ($this->nmgp_opcao == "incluir") {$this->nmgp_opcao = "novo";};

 $Campos_Erros['login'][] = $this->Ini->Nm_lang['lang_errm_mnch'] . " 5 " . $this->Ini->Nm_lang['lang_errm_nchr'];

$trab_saida = substr($trab_campo, $tam_campo - 1, 1) . $trab_saida;

those are just few fragments from single file…

I really do not like to be negative and I’m trying to find as much positive aspects of SC as possible, but sometimes it is just to much…
Something like this drives me nuts, and to be honest if I saw this before I purchased SC I would never ever again look at SC.

IF YOU AGREE THIS INSANE PRACTICE OF EMBEDING PORTUGESE VARIABLES AND STRINGS SHOULD BE ABANDONED AND CHANGED, PLEASE SEND AN EMAIL TO NET MAKE AND SUPPORT THIS POST

#2

I have had similar concerns. There seems to be a lot of things that have mixed languages. Marketed the way SC is, they really should be translated better. I am in the process of buying SC, but still have some big concerns. Sometimes I feel like I am jumping out of one product frying pan and into another.

#3

Arthur,

I certainly SUPPORT your post!

Here is my theory:

The majority of ScriptCase code was hacked together by programmer wanna-be types with little or no education or practical experience with professional software development standards. They choose to ignore well established industry standard software development practices such as Regression Testing, Public Bug Tracking, etc. Software that “pretty much works most of the time” is fine for products aimed at hobbyists, but has no place in a development tool intended for professional programmers to use. Add to this the fact that there are essentially no communications channels for support, and you have an ongoing nightmare for customers.

I understand that Portugese is the first language for the employees at NetMake. I have the same challenge in my company, Tagalog (or one of the 100+ dialects) is the first language of most of my employees. That said, we have clear software coding standards that require naming variables using English terms for variables as well as comments, so that any reasonably competent programmer any where in the world can understand the code and make changes or corrections in a reasonable amount of time. Our product documentation is written in English because that is the market that we have chosen to sell into. In addition, our 24/7 support hotline is exclusively English speaking. We do this for all the same reasons that international airline pilots must speak to air traffic control in English: Standardization. That is what I mean by professional.

I hear constantly that “things are getting better”. I also read posts from 5 years ago that say the same thing. It is wishful thinking. There will be no significant change until somebody that actually understands “professional software development process” gets employed by NetMake in a management role. I do not believe that will happen until the sales numbers decline. Upper management at NetMake obviously is judging the quality of the product based solely on the sales numbers, while ignoring customer feedback.

As long as people are buying it, it must be good, right? The United States FBI estimates that more than 11 million US dollars were transferred to Nigerian “Princes” last year. Sales numbers have no relationship to quality of product, sales numbers are directly related to the quality of the sales effort.

The real qualified, hardworking professionals that work at NetMake are in the Sales Department. They could sell ice to Eskimos. They sold ScriptCase to me.

This is all just my theory…

Dave

#4

Double support from me… But if you really really want to know what it does then deploy your application and use a php debugger (xdebug for example) and go through your code single stepping and breakpoint your way into it.

#5

Sad part is that… If I’m using scriptcase is precisely not to deal with generated code.

but u know…

#6

[QUOTE=kafecadm;33699]Sad part is that… If I’m using scriptcase is precisely not to deal with generated code.

but u know…[/QUOTE]

Yes but as the development environment isn’t all that amazing I’ve frequently ran into missing a semicolon or some brackets somewhere.
Although to be honest I myself haven’t really been bothered by the Spanish/Portugeuse variables all that much, quickly running it through google translate usually gives me a decent idea where it’s originating from.

#7

I think that if you decide to buy/use scriptcase that you have evaluated the product including the generated code. The product is from Brazil, a portugues speaking country. If you don’t like it, don’t use it. I’ve been working with a lot of generators in the past, including cobol generators in the 80’s and I always wondered why people would like to use that, just because of the overhead and other mishaps. But the advantage is clear, you build faster. Nobody is complaining nowadays using software components with loads of unused functionality depending on setting of properties. Or that a ‘hello world’ application generates mb’s of code where it use to be 1k at most. In the early days I was writing assembler, and when the first compilers came I was wondering why the code was generated so badly. But I never look into that any more. Same goes for generated sourcecode. If you want readable code: write it yourself. The generated code is not intended to be readable.

#8

Albert - I disagree with you. I did the same thing and I used (and still using a bit) of CLARION. This is the 4GL tool that allows to create projects the similar way SC does. I started using Clarion while still DOS was major operating system on 90% of PCs. After some time the company went to Windows. From the very beginning the code was readable and you could even turn an option to generate code comments for you. Clarion still generates excellent code - at least in sense of readability. The files size is a different story and I agree with you on that part that we should not expect to much here. The only downside of using Clarion these days is that it is a tool for desktop (not web) applications and that is the reason I turned into SC.

Your statement “you do not have to use SC” is not adequate because that is something everybody knows. We do not have to be told we can quit using SC. The problem is that many developers here invested their $$ and time into NetMake and have several projects already under development (or finished) and this is very hard decision to quit. In many cases it would be simply impossible (or one would have to re-write the whole project from scratch). If I knew what I know now about SC I would not buy it. The trial period for SC testing is absolutely not enough to find out the positive and all negative aspects of the tool
Perhaps for those who reading this post the forum might be somewhat helpful.

You keep repeating that the company is from Brasil, and this has nothing to do with the issue. This is not an excuse at all !
There are hundreds of companies from all over the world developing tools and software. Some DO and some DON’T have problem with English language.
WHY some do ?

  1. Simply because of a poor management. The moment they hire a person who does not know English they start loosing.
  2. Wrong business paradigm. Instead of starting everything in English then translating into local languages, they do opposite.
  3. Not paying attention to details and poor quality control
  4. Not listening to existing customers (no surveys, no evaluation etc.)

I have already mentioned on this forum that I have software that I use which is coming from several NON ENGLISH (i.e Germany, Sweden, Russia, Spain) speaking countries and there are absolutely no problems with manuals, support, or software itself. I have never complained about their English skills. That just proves IT CAN BE DONE, so your excuses for NetMake Ablert DO NOT MAKE SENSE.

I also have to mention that I worked for large software development company in Poland (about 20 years ago). We were still working on DOS software (as this was time the company was slowly switching into Windows). If somebody have had put a code, comment or variable name in Polish - this person after few incidents would be fired from work. There was a small bug testing department which not only tested for bugs but also for code quality (including English language within the code). It does not mean that every employee in that company spoke fluent English, but the final product (along with the documentation and support) was pure 100% English. I KNOW IT CAN BE DONE and it is not that hard, it just requires better management. Obviously like it was mentioned earlier NetMake management relies on number of sales only. Nothing else matters.

The bottom line is: If I haven’t developed several projects in SC already and simply cannot abandon my clients I would quit using SC tomorrow. Not because the tool is so terribly bad, but because NetMake mentality is not in a right position for the company to grow, expand and improve. I simply see no interaction between users and the company and that is the dead point of business which eventually bring the company to death. If you want to research more on that just take a look at “Code Charge Studio” from YES SOFTWARE. This is a products I owned and used for few years. Generated code is 1000% better that none from SC and there are no “foreign language” variables (altgough many developers as well as owner are Polish, Russians, Bulgarians etc.).
Unfortunately it is right now in its agonal / dying stage with almost 0% sales. Promising product with terrible company management. http://ccs.garfieldus.com Just to give you an example - at some point I was banned from their forum for criticizing and this happened to others as well. I’m glad it does not happen here at least (so this is positive aspect of being NM customer). Here are some alternatives…although none of them will allow to get the App done as quick as SC. One thing is sure, none of those have English problems like NetMake company.

https://codeontime.com/CodeOnTime_CodeCharge
http://www.awareim.com/blog/
http://livecode.com/

Arthur

#9

Arthur, I’m not against you, and we share in general the same opinion. I think that I have posted a lot of that on this forum. And I agree that SC has QC issues. But regarding the generated code, I realy don’t care if variables are portugues or not. The product is around 15 years old and relatively short on the world market. I try to avoid looking into the generated code as much as I can. I can live with the poor English. But I’m not the type of man to repeat the issues over and over again because that simply won’t work and there’s nothing to win doing that.

I don’t want to go into details of competative products like Codecharge, PHP runner and others. I have worked with most of them and there’s a reason why I stick to Scriptcase. Despite the issues on QC etc. Scriptcase is a great tool and I’m working hard with SC to get the QC standards up. I don’t want to take all the credit, but the fact that SC stopped creating new features and started bugfixing was severly discussed between me and people from Scriptcase. It’s a major step forewards.

Regarding the competative products I saw forums censorized, new releases which I even could get running, releases that broke my development fully. Compared to that, SC isn’t doing so bad. But it’s a fact that there’s a lot of room for improvement. And I will keep on working on that.

#10

Here is something impressing http://www.filemaker.com/products/demos/#fm-create-solutions

http://solutions.filemaker.com/made-for-filemaker/search.jsp?category=5

I do not want to comment on product or compare it to SC as it is a little bit different solution, but just the way it is presented, and the whole documentation part should be an example on how things should be done. they have done excellent job ! I wish SC would have at least 50% of that functionality. Their site is excellent - easy to navigate full of information with clean layout and features and products clearly explained.

Art

#11

Albert - I understand that beating the complain drum won’t help on the forum, but the intent here is to make other users aware of the problem and have them send messages to SC support and management team as well as on this forum so perhaps some one finally make a decision about those important issues.
If you like to use a language dictionary while working on software development - that’s fine - I HATE DOING THIS and it drives me nuts !
For the code - YES - I try to stay away from dealing with generated code, until I run into some problems, bugs, errors etc. Then I have no choice but lookup into it and it is like opening Pandora’s Box! Box full of sheet!
THE MISTAKE of embeding Portugese into the code was probably made long time ago when SC started, but if your statement is true (about SC being on the market for 15 yrs) it makes things even worse because that proves that this same insane approach is continued for so many years. Sorry but I see no excuse for that.
I’m glad you still have energy to struggle with NetMake for improvements but we really need more users keep pushing company management to change their paradigm.

Art

#12

I like this one better.

http://www.alphasoftware.com/

Check the quick app creation. plus the best feature… offline support.

Regards

#13

It’s why am working on obtaining an independent user group as most companies have one. Individual complaints are easily ignored. In the current situation, afaik most of the Brazilian devs do not speak a decent level of English, so changing variable names from portugues to english would be difficult. Look at the sample of the webshop where even the items table is called itens. But despite these issues I want the product to be bugfree so that I don’t have to dive into generated code. I find changing variable names a waste of time for now as there are more important issue to solve imho. Oh, and I do know filemaker. As I said, I’ll stick to SC.

#14

+1

I would push for:

  • better documentation (videos are not very usable as quick reference and the written docs could be improved)
  • more macros (e.g. changing button names on event)
  • reliability, i.e. fixing bugs
  • improving the IDE by adding\improving features to avoid manual repetitive operations
#15

consistent macros like odd differences between field properties in grids, but not in forms
in the future:
integration of a php debugger like xdebug, open source-d code templates, expandable with 3rd party plugins.

#16

Albert:

I appreciate your efforts, please keep on it… something tells me you are one of the main reasons NM is improving… I’m trying to participate in this forums to enrich not only myself but community members as well, so I take your input with high regard.

Truth is that if we posts comments like this in the forums is because we as users of SC want SC itself to be better.

Regards

#17

Consistency. Good point.

In the future:

  • A must: Mobile \ Responsive forms

  • Nice to have: Grid with fixed headers and scroll bar

freeze-gridview.png

#18

here is another fragment 50% non-English , that just popped out on my screen a minute ago:

Id do menu nao encontrado.
class:
file: C:\Program Files\NetMake\v8\wwwroot\scriptcase\devel\lib\php\functions.inc.php
function: StartIncItensCoolJsMenu
line: 2670
topico -> [fields_tit]	Id do menu nao encontrado.
class:
file: C:\Program Files\NetMake\v8\wwwroot\scriptcase\devel\lib\php\functions.inc.php
function: StartIncItensCoolJsMenu
line: 2670
topico -> [events_tit_ajax]	Id do menu nao encontrado.
class:
file: C:\Program Files\NetMake\v8\wwwroot\scriptcase\devel\lib\php\functions.inc.php
function: StartIncItensCoolJsMenu
line: 2670
topico -> [fields_app_tit]	Id do menu nao encontrado.
class:
file: C:\Program Files\NetMake\v8\wwwroot\scriptcase\devel\lib\php\functions.inc.php
function: StartIncItensCoolJsMenu
line: 2670
topico -> [link_tit]
#19

Arthur, you know if you dive into the code you will find tons of samples. You made your point already, so what are you trying to prove?

#20

Albert,

I think that the main reason that some of us tend to repeat the same complaints over and over is because it seems like they are either:

  1. Not heard by NetMake.

or

  1. Heard but ignored.

As a parent, I learned that many times I have to tell my children the same thing repeatedly, sometimes in different words, before they think about what I am saying and act upon it.

I am sorry if I seem like I am repeating myself, or “beating the complaint drum”, but tell me - What other option is there for us paying customers to get NetMake to listen to us? Or to acknowledge the fact that they have many, many dissatisfied and/or unhappy customers?

In addition, I feel a moral obligation to those people who are evaluating ScriptCase. If I knew a year ago what I know now about NetMake, would not have bought ScriptCase. Unfortunately, I too have far too much time and effort invested in customer projects to simply drop everything and change now.

Again, Albert, I am sorry if my posting of my opinion upsets you, or if you are dissatisfied with the “type of man” that I am.

Dave