Reasons to renew licence?

Developers General
#1

My licence for SC5 is about expire. Whether or not to renew is an agonizing decision.

During the last twelve months, the first three were totally wasted. Lots of problems. Code generation that required lots of intervention to get it to work, most macros not working, and so on.

Then there were a few good months and relatively productive ones. Put together three medium scale and useful projects, all making use of the dictionary to speed up development. If you’ve used the dictionary you know that a fair amount of time needs to be spent sorting it out, but once done there are time saving benefits. All in all, not too bad an experience.

Then, a few weeks ago, an update brought it all undone. Those applications we developed with dictionaries can no longer be maintained. The code generated produces a heap of fatal errors. Macros again are behaving incorrectly and some don’t work at all. Back to removing the macros and inserting my own code <sigh>

So, what to do? Do I live in in hope and renew the license in anticipation that SC5.n will at some point reach stability? Or do I cut my losses and look for something else or use the tools that I know work - perhaps PHPRunner for quick development of less demanding projects and CodeLobster or a similar IDE for the more demanding stuff?

And then there’s matter of PHP5.3. It’s been around for a year or more and it seems that no way will SC5 catch up because of its dependence on ZEND.

It’s a worry.

Cheers

#2

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

I think the only person that can answer your question is you. You will have to decide based on your projects. I usually find that if I have to talk myself into using something, that is my answer.

Regards,
Scott.

#3

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

You’re right, of course. I think I just wanted to have whine. Or maybe a shoulder to cry on <grin>

#4

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

Hello,

there are no code generators without problems at all. I used PHPRunner for a long time and
after update lost a lot of code… so changing to phprunner…?

Other generators have problems with the amount of tables and will stop if the project is getting
to big. Other generators don’t support the parallel work of developers …

The support of SC is really bad. My latest ticket took 11 days before I got an answer !!
And this answer was for nothing !!

I will stay working with SC and hope that the developers of SC will be aware that without us
they have no work in future.

Best regards
Uwe Pfeiffer

#5

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

[quote author=Pfeiffer link=topic=4070.msg9545#msg9545 date=1300631054]
there are no code generators without problems at all. I used PHPRunner for a long time and
after update lost a lot of code… so changing to phprunner…?[/quote]

I have had and been using PHPRunner since before SC. I only use it for minor applications, but to its credit I have not had any dramatic problems with it.

The support of SC is really bad. My latest ticket took 11 days before I got an answer !!
And this answer was for nothing !!

Mine are not even getting answered. Even when I was paying for it. If it hadn’t been for Scott Martin I probably would have dumped SC 9 months ago.

I will stay working with SC and hope that the developers of SC will be aware that without us they have no work in future.

The problem for me is that my install is pretty much useless. I re-installed over the weekend but I have the same issues. Any form using blocks will, after saving a record, hang.

I think I’ll bite the bullet and go back to writing PHP applications the hard way using one of the many IDEs that are out there. At least then I can only blame myself when it goes pear shaped.

Cheers

#6

JOIN FORCES Re: Reasons to renew licence?

JOIN FORCES?

Is there a way we, SC developers, can join forces to make Netmake aware of the problems, and to convince them they have to improve support, documentation, speed of bug fixes and communication?

I have sent about 5 emails on these subjects over the past few months to sales and support at SC, only one response from sales that they would forward my mail to the Netmake board.

Any ideas how to join forces?

#7

Re: JOIN FORCES Re: Reasons to renew licence?

My problem is that using SC is now really starting to eat into my time. I intend writing to them tomorrow telling them why I won’t be renewing my licence. But given their conspicuous absence from these forums and their reluctance to respond to cries for help I suspect it’ll be more wasted time.

I reckon SC is to Code Generators what the Big Mac is to food; “Promises so much, delivers so little”.

Cheers

#8

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

Hello there guys,

GuiGuy, I completely understand what is going into you head, if you dont know me, i used to work on the Scriptcase support and now im helping to develop some Scriptcase training, what i can tell is that on the last update we changed alot of internal things on the Scriptcase that will make the other updates much more easier to apply than what we are used to, so the perspective to the next updates are much more soft than this one.

About what happened to you, the dictionary and the macros we have to see it closer, you might have suffer from a corrupted update, so please get my email so we can discuss what happened closer. carlos@netmake.com.br

About the support issues, the support is suffering a drastic change right now, so in this process of change the quality of our support may suffer a little bit, but i can tell you for sure that on next couple months it will get better.

I hope that i could help you GuiGuy a little bit, hope to hear from you soon.

Best Regards,
Carlos Lacerda

#9

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

In just a couple of weeks, we did put a prototype together. Separate from the lack of 5.3 support, the generated code seems to be very bulky, the development documentation is too poor. I can not put any of our junior programmers on this. So, we have started using Yii to write our production version and keep SC for prototype. I have dedicated a laptop to SC (running Ubuntu 10.10) to avoid constant downgrading.

Regards,
Saeed

#10

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

I’m in decision to buy it so I need to re-think again.

#11

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

I think if you’re prepared for a “love-hate” relationship, SC is probably OK. It’s affordable. It can be RAD. It is flexible.

But it does generate bulky code, updates (often necessary) some times break things. It is this last issue that gets me fuming; abvout 5 or six updates ago the update broke the dictionaries behaviour. I had to rework the application to take the dictionary out. To this day any application I create that uses the dictionary will fail during code generation. Parsing of complex SQL statements during code generation is another problem area.

If you can afford it, add SC to your arsenal to create middle range, reasonably sophisticated projects. For really quick development of simpler projects, use PHPRunner. For demanding projects, once that have some real smarts, look to one of the more traditional IDEs and be prepared to do some hand coding. Or look at alternatives.

#12

Re: Reasons to renew licence?

Hello,

I used PHPRunner for several years.
If you think an update will not break your code… you live in paradies.
More the one time I had to recreate my code because PHPRunner destroyed my individual
forms and grids…

You will find no software on earth without buggs…

Best regards
Uwe