Is Scriptcase people is listening our comments?

Scriptcase 8 Discussion
#8

Albert - I spoke with Marcia some time ago and she clearly said they will not spend time on tracking bugs (even minimal time which is checking what has been fixed and watching what has been registered). Mantis project is kinda complex and require some time for the user. If anything would ever succeed it must be super simple and very quick to use. Most DEVs have no time to learn new system. I know you might say it is not complex, but it still require some time. Even a fact to create a new account, confirmation, etc already adds time. It would be super easy if NetMake would just allow to use their users database (even the one from the forum). If would eliminate creating new accounts, storing passwords etc. On the other hand I really appreciate your efforts to help. Personally I can’t imagine how software company can function without public bug tracking - THIS IS A MUST. Although CEO thinks it isn’t. We are at the dead end :frowning:

I think I can make an assumption that NetMake simply does not want to keep public bug tracking because they not fixing bugs. They fix perhaps most critical which prevent development but everything else is not fixed. They philosophy is to add as much new stuff ass possible because when the release new version they can charge and make a profit. We all know very well that certain bugs (not critical but very serious) are not fixed for years.

#9

What can I say. It does take time for sure but on the other hand, bugs get fixed. It’s a matter of priority where to spend the resources to, and I must agree: they follow other principles then I do.

#10

May we can to explore other tools like Laravel, SC is a very good tool, but a tool with many bugs and the worst, no fixed or that end user feel that we are not important for the company, the users will go to other side.

I hope that SC can read this and keep a eye and the most important, resources in order that can deploy a better tool without many issues.

#11

There is nothing wrong with Laravel, but it’s a completely different tool with different problems. Same goes for tools like YUI, Dojo, etc. There is no such thing as ‘the ultimate tool’. The main issue of Scriptcase is not the product. It’s by far more productive than using frameworks. It’s the way they manage their customers. I have tried a lot over the years to get that process more transparent. But, above all, that’s not an issue of sales, they want to improve these things. It’s a matter of ceo, his will is law. And culture: don’t do today what you can do tomorrow. Unfortunately.

#12

I agree!

I as a customer feel very “unloved” by Scriptcase.
Do they care for us? Do they want us to do well?

For a start, they could show up more often on these forums.

#13

oh, this topic again, almost every few months :smiley:

here will save you some time… nothing will happen and you will keep using SC happily, it will in fact teach you how to be “workaround” guru

then after few months, again, bug tracker offer, more commitment required from SC management… nothing serious

few more updates from SC guys, cover some points and bugs for some of us, some people will draw smiles

new guys get to SC, then again go through the power that SC can provide, and discover what can be done better, request for support, follow up… bug issues… full excitement… escalate to request to change CEO, some american company to take over and show real business and quality, roadmap for the next 10 years and how it can be much much better … agree,

more time -> again, this topic in next few months once more and so on :slight_smile:

cheers, its Friday :smiley:

#14

This is a loop

#15

indeed agree Giu, I remember you were with us when this was raised many times before, hope you are still young enough to remember :smiley:

cheers

#16

Hi all,

“… It’s a matter of ceo, his will is law. And culture: don’t do today what you can do tomorrow. Unfortunately.” in that way, like he don’t want to see this problems, may be he should see when the people do the migration to other tools, my point is, they are “in confort zone” because is not easy this change, but if a lot people send messages with this warning or we can find some tool to migrate, the CEO could change your way of think, we need to do pression by some way, I dont know what you think you.

AYMG

#17

Not sure if it is a matter of culture, CEO or just a character. The fact is that I’m intensively looking to switch to other product. Even if I find one (have few candidates) I still have few projects made in SC and need to maintain them somehow. That is the worst part, because to re-make them from scratch (even with the structures and logic in place already) would take long time and NetMake will not cover this cost. My wish is that some other company will take over the concept and continue with much better quality.
The problem here is that neither CEO or managers at NetMake seem to care to read those posts on the forum. Few people of contact (like Marcia etc.) are already overwhelmed with complains but their hands are tied and there isn’t much they can do.
I observer very similar situation to YES SOFTWARE - the makes of CODE CHARGE STUDIO.
When people started complaining about bugs etc the forum admin started cutting them off the forum so they cannot post bad messages. At some point I had a company employee contacted me with the warning that I cannot say bad things about the product or the company because if I do I would be removed from the forum or perhaps even denied the license. That was like a slap in a face and I got extremely pissed of. I told them that with this attitude their future is rather doubtful. About two years later they got to the point of almost ZERO sells. At this moment CodeCharge Studio is very much abandoned, although it was very promising product.

https://www.yessoftware.com

http://www.windev.com

http://store.softvelocity.com

I also worked with another tool called CLARION from TopSpeed (later TopVelocity). IT was much better product than CodeChageSt. It had much less bugs and the bug fixing process was much better. They also have had huge user base. Unfortunately they only supported Windows. There were some tools for PHP/ASP apps but they were crappy. The worst part was the marketing. Because they did not sell lots of licenses they had to rise the price of the product (almost by 200%), then the userbase started to shrink. At some point they stopped any web oriented dev. and concentrated on Windows (that was the biggest mistake). Since then the user base became smaller and smaller.
About 2 years later new french company announced the new tool called WinDev, then later WebDev and 2 years later MobileDev. They used exactly same concept as CLARION did but with much more success. They also invested all earnings into building bigger developer base. The price for the product was high so they could afford to higher more developers and add extras.
At this moment CLARION is rather dead and PCSOFT thrives.
One thing that bothers me is that they have similar concept of developing everything in French then converting into English. This sucks because all DOCs and new improvements are usually about 3-6 months late comparing to the french version. At this moment for the price of $1500 you can get all 3 packages and 1 yer of updates. The fellow programmer who uses it says the software has everything that might be ever needed to develop Apps.

This is the story of 2 companies (YesSoftware and TopVelocity) who fall into the same scenario as NetMake. I guess this is the last call for SC to get things changed. In comparison I use tools from ANYWHERE SOFTWARE from Israel. It has several components (B4A, B4i, B4J). It is not a code generator as SC but it is excellent product. Support is top notch and the bugs are fixed very very fast. There is huge userbase and forum is excellent. It allows to use 3rd party libs and it is cheap. This company is an example of how to do the software business and comparing to NetMake it is like BLACK and WHITE.

https://www.b4x.com

I really wish NetMake success but I doubt their attitude will change anytime soon. It seems that we can scream and cry here but no one from NetMake cares (because they still getting pay-checks). It will change one day when there will be no money to pay them but it will be to late to rebuild. We are all developers here and we know that if we do not fix bugs one day we loose that customer (or bunch of customers). The market law is same for all and investing energy and time in sells while having poor product one day will reveal the BIG MISTAKE but it would be to late.
You might also check this

Arthur

#18

Short answer, NO. I agree with Arthur , check out his post on scriptcase alternatives

#19

I left CodeCharge in the past for the very same reason… 3 years for an update (5.0 -> 5.1), new bugs, problems converting projects… but at least I can edit the generated code. CodeCharge tracks the automatic generated code and the modified one. Simpler than SC. And generates ASP, PHP, C# and other languages code.

I swallow hard, choose to be a PHP only developer, ans switch to ScriptCase. Now I’m very nervous: I got now 4 major projects developed in SC.

I export and re-import a backup for test purposes: Madness: some projects return to old versions. I cannot touch generated code, because every new deploy re-write it. Workarounds? I spent more time doing workarounds than developing. All the time I gain for using a generator was lost due to little annoyances. And every update seems to break some AJAX, or buttons, or grid links or something. Every time.

So what? Instead of $200-$500 tools must we look into $3000 tools to be treated like we deserve?

After two years I bought SC, I’m still receiving mails to ask me how it goes with my “trial”. Not really a good sign, don’t you think.

I know there must be some hard to solve bugs… all I ask for is transparency…

#20

I think we need an open-source tool based on ScriptCase :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
#21

These kind of Rapid Application Development tools are all to some degree ridden with the same kind of maladies (things that are bad or problematic). I remember using WinDev some years ago. There were also complaints about PCSoft (the company owning the product) being greedy and just wanting to release new versions with features and not fixing the bugs. Their product is $1.000-$1.600 per development license and $300 for an application server needed for every end user installation. They now have WebDev as well, a product that generates PHP like ScriptCase. Just out of curiosity I went to PCsoft’s forum for WebDev and what do you know, it does not seem to be nearly as active as our forum here. Also it has several posts describing problems with the product:
http://forum.pcsoft.fr/en-US/pcsoft…dev/page/1.awp

Another tool is Realbasic that later became Xojo, which I also considered at one point in time. Again, there were the same complaints in the community of many new releases you had to pay for and bugs not getting fixed. I spent quite some time looking at tools and finally chose ScriptCase as the best of them for web development in regards to features. It is quite reasonable priced as well with no per end user fees and no application server license fees.

To be sure, there are things that I would like ScriptCase to improve on. In particular, make the documentation cover ScriptCase in great detail on all features with more examples. This would go a long way to attract professional developers alone through word of mouth. ScriptCase could become an accepted general development tool and move to another order of magnitude as a company. I really wish that ScriptCase could envision this and act on it.

Moving on to a higher order of magnitude is also the solution to being better at handling the minor bugs. As it is now, ScriptCase has to push on with new features to stay relevant and thus have to prioritise which bugs to fix. It is the fate of all software tool makers with smaller markets. PCSoft and Xojo are the same, as are probably most of them. I remember one of the developers of ScriptCase some time back mentioned that ScriptCase has a huge legacy code base. Thus, I think that part of the problem is changing this code base to something better and at the same time introduce new features as well as fixing bugs.

However, all in all, I find that the solutions that I create with ScriptCase, do work at the installations. When I run into bugs and contact Netmake, they do come back to me in a timely manner to get a resolution. I think that as long as one maintains an active license, they will do that.

I think that Arthur (AKA) is very creative and active in the forum, but I also feel that he sometimes goes overboard in his criticism – most likely in frustration over not being able to force a change in Netmake. I have been there myself, but have decided that my energy is better spent focusing on my development rather than ranting about things that I cannot change anyway, and which in most cases does not really prevent me from moving on with my projects.

I must say that I do not find it helpful to create an atmosphere of fear and uncertainty, painting a picture that is worse than the actual reality as a way to get back at Netmake. I have worked with ScriptCase about 1? year. I find that I can create applications in a fast manner, deploy them and have them work for the end users. In that time, ScriptCase has only become better as a product. To also remember the positive, let’s look at what has happened with ScriptCase:

  1. They have added tabbed applications so that several parts of the overall application can be open at the same time. My users love that feature.

  2. ScriptCase has been moved to PHP 5.6 for performance improvement

  3. The overall look of the development environment had a bit of a face lift

  4. The grids had the infinite scroll added to them

  5. Search features of grids and forms were improved

  6. Refined search was added to grid to enhance the pivot table functions

  7. Including whole external class libraries in a project, making for easier use of them

I am sure there are others that I do not remember.

#22

Nice write-up, Frank.

I like SC myself. I just wish their staff communicated with us more. It would be good if they showed us (their customers) more love!!

Eg:When we make a suggestion or report a bug, it would be nice if they could tell us they have seen it and if they plan to look into it or not.

#23

Thanks!

Yes, it would be nice with more interaction on the forum. I think the staff are just very busy and time is not set aside in anyone’s job for forum interaction.

#24

I think that all in this forum, we want that. The original reason for this topic is find some way in order that SC listen to us!

AYMG

#25

That is precisely why I sometimes SCREAM on the forum hoping that the screaming will bring some attention of the company. As far as new features I DO NOT WANT THEM unless major bugs are fixed. I do not want the company to spend energy on new features while I’m having issues with running the software. NOW - the bugs and issues can fall (in my opinion) in 3 categories:
1- preventing development or production
2- making job very hard to complete
3- documentation, IDE, Help, etc

While I understand the 1 Cat takes longer time to fix and sometimes needs more documentation, I must say that 3rd category in many cases takes few minutes to fix issues. Category 2 is something ca can live with although if not taken care of it will show lack of professionalism from the company.
What really pisses me of that issues/bugs in category 3 are not fixed and ignored. bugs in category 1 are often considered no to be a bugs. For example I received one about 5-6 emails from the support arguing with me weather the problem should be called a BUG or an ISSUE ? instead concentrating on fixing it.

Here comes the worst part of SC development and company interaction:

  1. Company never asks users about priorities or features which need to be implemented
  2. Company claims that BUGS ARE REPORTED AND WILL BE FIXED, but does not fix them
  3. Out of many times my interaction with support was satisfied maybe up to 10-20%. Most of the time it was an language issue where the support could neither understand the problem or was able to explain their point of view (simply English barrier).

I do not know how many of you had recorded time spent on your project and how much of that time is wasted on struggling with Help, manuals, finding workarounds or interacting with NM support. I’m not talking about learning something, I’m talking about the process which should work (according to the manuals) but it doesn’t . If you add this time into your development time the time spent on the project might change drastically.

Once again if NetMake will not listen and react to this forum sooner or later will end up as other companies. I really want to like SC and I really want them to succeed although it will require some change in the attitude and that might come hard to change. I hope that no one will deny the fact that fixing bugs in software is and will always be a PRIORITY (even over implementing new features). So far NetMake has proven it is not. I see minor changes - as they finally publish the channel log on their website but this is not enough. We have asked here on this forum number of times to publish the bug fixing list and this is CRUCIAL, although it is ignored for several years. That is what pisses me the most.

As far as other products - yes PCSOFT is french company and also has some issues with documentation. Forum is as active as this one and when I talk to WebDev developers they also have some complains although those complaints are more towards the documentation and not so much bug fixing. The bottom line is that PCSOFT is much better in bug fixes than NETMAKE. Using WebDev and other products once you master W language you use only one language for all development platforms while using SC you deal with several languages. This might be another advantage of using RAD tool, although I’m not saying that using W is better than using JS, PHP HTML, CSS etc…

I would really love to see some public discussion with the involvement of NetMake to prioritize main issues and features. I you really want to know/understand what am I talking about I would strongly recommend to take a look at B4X (anywhere Software Company). This is the place where most other companies should learn how to build products, documentation, how to market is, do the support and all other tasks involved. Out of all companies I have met in my 35+ years in IT this would be absolutely number 1.
If NetMAKE would take their approach and philosophy and just do the same way I would prize them for the rest of my life.

#26

Eg:When we make a suggestion or report a bug, it would be nice if they could tell us they have seen it and if they plan to look into it or not.

This happened in the past. Just search for Bartho in the forums ROFL.

I would really love to see some public discussion with the involvement of NetMake to prioritize main issues and features. I you really want to know/understand what am I talking about I would strongly recommend to take a look at B4X (anywhere Software Company). This is the place where most other companies should learn how to build products, documentation, how to market is, do the support and all other tasks involved. Out of all companies I have met in my 35+ years in IT this would be absolutely number 1.

Totally agree.

Just to add, don’t think they listen too much to us (partners). I would like to avoid to express my complete opinion about the situation, I just want to +1 what @Orion sais in his post. SC is a good tool, and with some bugs and problems here or there, it works great for his job. Negativity only looks like SC don’t works, and this is not the real situation. Problems behind SC is more complicated than 1 paragraph of words. It’s a problem of culture, resources, management and a lot of more things, on a butterfly effect.

Just my 2 cents. Hiding again on my cave lol

#27

When it comes to serious bugs, I agree that fixing them should be a priority. In the quite frequent ScriptCase releases from Netmake there are various bug fixes, which must be what they consider serious. It is of course a matter of opinion, which bugs are the important ones. Anything for which there is a work-around will probably not be prioritised. However, all tools developers prioritise bugs and some gets pushed for later fixing in order to release new features.

I can imagine that PCSoft, Xojo and other similar tool developers may also not have public bug tracking systems. There is a certain vulnerability to that, which many of them may not like.

When it comes to documentation I totally agree with you. It would not require that much effort to improve the language and over time they could extend the documentation with more depth and examples. You, I and others have even offered our help with this, but it has been rejected for reasons that one can only speculate about. There are now and then efforts to document from Netmake, but they are sporadic, short lived and not organised. As time goes by, it matters less for me personally as I learn the different parts of ScriptCase as well as the mix of JavaScript and HTML as needed. However, it would mean a lot for new programmers and ScriptCase’s repution if these things were in order.

I find that ScriptCase Support’s level of English when reporting and describing problems has improved a lot over the last ? year or so. For me, their English level is now quite sufficient that I can describe any problem I encounter.

B4X looks like an interesting tool for desktop, mobile and IoT stuff with a single common language as the base. For web development it is difficult to get around JavaScript and handling HTML’s document model. This has, however, not particular to do with ScriptCase, but web development in general. Both Xojo and WebDev offers a total abstraction from the HTML / JavaScript in the programming tool / language. I am not sure how effective or good it is in comparison.

I really do not agree with you, Arthur, that Netmake is headed for sure oblivion because they will not listen to you :). They have been the way they are for very long and, regardless, have managed to stay alive for many years, releasing new versions of their software with useful features. This is not to say that their unwillingness to change and handle the mentioned issues does not have an effect. I think that it is what will keep them at a certain level as a company, when they could instead be heading for the stars – and that is really a pity. However, I do believe they will be around with their RAD tool in the years to come. Albert is running a succesful business software development shop with 10 developers using ScriptCase and there are others like GIU with a long track of using ScriptCase. I do not know how long Albert, Giu, etc. have been in the game, but that fact also speaks of the usefulness of the tool over several years and versions.