Steve
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| Posted: 09/23/2002, 11:29 AM |
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I Own CC v2.0 and am evaluating Code Charge Studio for Purchase as a Development Environment for a company. Their project is a medium to large scale application. The current IDE is Dreamweaver. The are interested in Code Charge since they know that I crank out pages (using CC v2.0) at a pace they are not obtaining. They are looking for someting more like CC Studio vs VV v2.0.
Concerns on CC v2.0 vs CC Studio - Will CC 2.0 still be supported, can't upgrade from CC v2.0 to CC Studio.
At this time, my recommendation is to not purchase the product for this company. Here are the reason.
1. Takes to long to do custom coding in events. No solid documentation on this area and too much time is spent trying to figure out how to make Code Charge Events work correctly.
2. Lack of Response for Support. Of course they are probably swamped with support questions due to lack of documentation. Go Figure. You think they would learn.
3. I have over 15 years development experience. If I am being slowed down due to the learning curve (lack of Documantation), then "Green" developers will be slowed down even more.
4. Is CC Studio a long term development environment? CC v2.0 to Studio made any applications non-upgradable to CCS. If CCS is the development Environment and CCS v2.0 comes out. Are all my applications stuck in the CCS v1.0.7. version which mat someday never be supported. When the product becomes un-supported, then you are stuck with a basic editor and editing the generated source (which is where you would be if you had not use Code Charge).
I will probably purchase the product for myself for independent projects I do. Here are the reasons:
1. Simple model with basic edits can be created quickly.
2. Long Learning Curve not an impact for small independent projects.
3. Hope that someday CodeCharge will get there logic together and realize the importance of good documentation.
4. As knowledge of how it works is gained, Internal Documentaion and examples can be developed for larger scale projects.
5. If the project is maintained with an editor (FrontPage or Dream Weaver) then a smaller application would be easier to maintain with the CCS model.
In the future this may be a product for larger scale products.
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Brian Pickrell
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| Posted: 09/30/2002, 10:28 AM |
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I'm in a similar position to your client's developers. I've been working with CodeCharge Studio for about three weeks and I'm having a terrible time doing anything beyond running the various Builders.
Here's a list of questions I have. They're dumb questions, but the point is that I can't seem to answer the dumb questions on my own. A lot of basic concepts are never explained in the documentation.
If anyone here can answer these questions for me, great. If anyone can point me to places in the documentation where I can look up the answers on my own, great.
If the CodeCharge people are working on tutorials or new manuals, maybe these can serve as suggested subjects for the tutorials.
GRIDS AND RECORDS
- What exactly is a grid and what exactly is a record?
- What does the Grid And Record Builder do that's different from using the Grid Builder and the Record Builder separately?
- Do the Search Builder and the Authentication Builder create different types of objects than Grids and Records, or are these specialized subtypes of Grids or Records?
- What exactly is a Source Type? The Properties window lists Table, Procedure, and SQL as the possible choices for this. What do these choices mean?
- What exactly is a Data Source? What is the connection between a Data Source and a Source Type? Why are there no choices listed under my Data Source pulldown list in the Properties window?
- Why is the Connection field for most of my objects blank, even though I specified the database once when I built the project and again when I built the object?
- How do I specify that a Grid will need to access more than one database table for different purposes? For instance, suppose I have a grid that lists names from the Customers table, but it has a title bar with a label based on the Quotations table?
- There seem to be several dialogs (as well as the Builders) that lead to the SQL builder. Is there a hierarchy for these? If I look at the builder for a label in a Grid, is it controlled by the Data Source for the containing Grid? What exactly is the scope of the results of one of these queries, and how do I refer to a particular result by name when I'm writing custom code?
CURLY BRACKETS
- What do the labels I keep seeing in curly brackets mean? For instance, {Label1}. Are these object names in the PHP code? Or are they CodeCharge constructs that will be used later to generate a different type of object? How do I determine what is the data type of one of these? What is their scope?
- What do I do if I want to define a variable to be used at different points in a page? I've found that if I create a Form containing nothing but a hidden field, it will generate a {Label}, but is there a less indirect way to do it?
- How do I get one item on my page to refer to a different item on the page? For instance, suppose I have a list of Managers and a list of Employees. When I click on a manager name, I want the second list to display the employees who are under that manager. How do I tell the Grid with the Employees names to use the selected Manager name in its query? I think this has something to do with Data Source, but beyond that it's not clear. As a second example, suppose I wanted a Grid to display the results of a custom-coded SQL query. How would I do that?
TABLE PARAMETERS
- The Table Parameter dialog box comes up when I click the "+" icon in the Where box of the SQL builder. What exactly is a Table parameter? What are the possible types?
- What does the field labeled "Parameter Source" mean? Why do I have to type this in instead of selecting something from a list?
- What do the different choices in the Type field mean? If I want to create a new PHP variable or use one I've created in custom code, what do I do?
- What does the Format field under the Parameter Source mean?
- What do I do if I want to use this box to compare two database results, for instance ...WHERE Users.Customer_id = Users.User_id ?
CUSTOM EVENT ACTIONS CODE
- When I'm writing custom code for an event, how do I figure out the name of the object I want to modify?
- There seems to be a ds class that contains most of the information that goes into an SQL query. Where can I look up the contents of this class?
- How do I look up the members and properties of an automatically generated object if I don't already know what they are? For instance, if I wanted to know whether the "ID" column of my "Personnel" Grid has a SetValue method that I can call, where would I find out? How would I find out if this column even exists as an object in the PHP code?
- What exactly is an action? Is it a class or object in PHP?
- Several of the actions seem to involve validation using strings of some sort? What are these and what's the syntax?
Properties/Format
- What does the Format tab of the Properties window pertain to? Is each of these a member variable of a class? Are they HTML tags? or what?
- How can I change a lot of Formats at once? For instance, the Language line for the Form I'm looking at is blank. If I want to add a few languages, do I have to change this item separately for every Form and other object on my Web site?
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