I am glad to announce that the very first version of the Moscripto web site is up and running: moscripto.com
Besides, a 30 days trial of the program can be downloaded from here.
There is also a growing Help section that describes the basics of the script language.
Follow up to my previous post, I decided to go with BCGSuite for MFC. I must say, I cannot be happiest with my decision. After day or so working on the integration of their Syntax Edit control in my project I discovered a bug in the painting routine. It was nothing serious and probably even hard to get to it (unless you are computer junkie as I am), but once I got it and knew it is in I felt.. arghh!@#!!
Good thing is that it is reproducible and I could repeat it again and again. I filed a support ticket and to my surprise after two days BCGSoft confirmed it was a bug and to my even bigger surprise, after 2-3 days they provided a fix!
So, that’s why the support contract is important when purchasing a library of this kind.
These days I am evaluating MFC GUI libraries for my current project “Moscripto”. The one I took into account are: Prof-UIS, CodeJock and BCGSuite.
I used before Prof-UIS and at the time it was OK for my needs, but now I need some features that are missing (as advanced Calendar control and Syntax edit control). Also, last time I downloaded the library and compiled it I had an impression as the painting in some of their samples is “kinda slow”.
CodeJock has the functionality I was looking for, but for the base price of $629 for the ToolkitPro you get only one month of free technical support and to extend it to a year you need to add plus $180.
I knew about BCGSoft already as the company whose GUI library Microsoft used to spice a bit their old MFC look, but I ruled it out because I thought they are missing the Syntax Edit control. But, I was wrong, they have it and my initial tests with Moscripto were fine, which is promising. The version 17 released this year ships with a Diagram/Flow chart control that could be also handy for my needs. And on top of that, BCGSuite is $599 with a one year of free support.
Anyway, still evaluating…
For the last week or so I started designing a simple scripting language that will serve as a base for my new product. The product code name is “Scheduled Jobs” and its main purpose will be to automate Windows jobs as backup of files and databases, various simple and not so simple tasks, etc. At first I thought it would be enough to define the tasks that will be executed in a job in XML file format, but after thoroughly examining the problematic it become obvious this approach will have many weaknesses and at the end, probably it wouldn’t be possible to support more complex tasks.
Then I started exploring different scripts that supports embedding in third party applications, specifically I took a look at Lua, Perl and Javascript. I really liked the Perl syntax and even spent some time on it, compiling it and running few simple scripts. But, again it become obvious I’ll just waste my time with these options as my main aim was full control over the underlying structure and endless flexibility.
That’s when I decided to design my own scripting language. It must be deadly simple to use, with as less rules as possible, with a big library that will provide most of the functionality.
So, at least I have a name for it: Moscripto. The idea for the name came to me from the name of the tiny insect Mosquito, which I believe this script language will be: tiny.
Finally, I decided it is time to update my company site. As I am working on two new software products, I believe I’ll have a lot of things to write about and a blog seems as a natural choice to record my thoughts.