Deployment could do with a few upgrades that would make the whole process much more useful and/or “hidden magic on the background”. Now, I can sort of understand why the entire Scriptcase system is more or less frozen during rendering - as it would make a mess if you’d be able to change files while the system is rendering their sources. But, currently it’s just clicking a button without any visual feedback whatsoever and waiting until the browser tells you it’s done. Even for small projects, this is easily 2-3 minutes when depoying to a .ZIP file, deploying to an external (S)FTP server is pretty much a shot in the dark weather or not PHP will throw a time-out.
Suggestion #01
Once a deployment option has been chosen and Scriptcase starts to work on it; provide real-time visual feedback on what it is doing. The first few times I actually had to restart my development server because I though the system crashed. All I had to do was wait it out; but since Scriptcase provides no feedback on the UI that it’s actually doing something it was confusing. Even more so because after it’s done; it’ll dump a finished progress bar at 100%. Like, there is a progress bar - but it doesn’t show progression or even show up at all until it’s done.
Suggestion #02
Having useable deployment profiles; now I still have to manually input all of the (S)FTP credentials on every deployment. This makes deploying (a part of) the project quite a hassle, especially if you’ve got to do a lot of deployment because something isn’t working because of production server specific behaviour (which is out of the scope of control of Scriptcase).
In both cases it seems there has alway been made some effort to implement this, but it isn’t working the way it should. I mean, it can’t possibly be the plan to have a progress bar that’s hidden from the user unless it’s at 100% - or a system with deployment profiles that does save some parts; but not all.