Hi,
For a product of such quality and maturity, PhpRunner falls miserably in the documentation area. By now, it should have a FAQ several hundreds questions long and instead of people wasting their time on this forum fishing for tips, they could access them in a better structured area. And the best platform for running such a FAQ system would PhpRunner itself. Why not use it?
I have exchanged emails with the good people who make PhpRunner and AspRunner and I am afraid, they just do not get it. It's easy when you have written a programming platform to know that the answer is obvious and fail to include it into the docs. It's not fun for somebody who is trying to find the answer and who has no way other than through trial and error and wild guesses.
The benchmark for a good documentation is this: every accessible programmatic behavior that could be of use to somebody should be explained. Instead, the PhpRunner documentation leaves a lot for guessing and experimenting, often with a lot of wasted time.
I own PhPRunner 4.2 and I have been trialling PhpRunner 5 for about 3 weeks. It has some great features but fails to deliver the package to programmers who are busy and don't have a spare hour for screwing around trying to find the answer to something that many must have done before. It should be in the documentation. It is also a selling point when many typical features of an application are explained by way of a tutorial. I am sure people do more with PhpRunner events than sending an email or updating another record.
How much documentation is there on the code snippets that can be inserted before and after a field? (not much). How do we use the parameters? (now I know). How can we pass the value of a field as a parameter? (you can't) Will the processing engine interfere with the output of such snippet functions? (yes). I had to find the answer to these questions through experimentation and a great deal of wasted time.
My favorite part of the documentation is this: "PHPRunner builtin functions. See include/commonfunctions.php. Most useful functions come with comments that explain what this function does." To this, you might be tempted to reply that you did not pay $299 to browse source code in the hope of finding some documentation.
A good database application generator goes well beyond a standard CRUD. And that's what PhpRunner has been successful at doing. It take a basic CRUD into the realms of a full-blown web application. Now, the documentation needs to be in the same class as the product.
Cheers,
JG
