Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

Re: If I were Microsoft's Marketing God

Author:Donald W. Larson
Posted:9/19/1999; 10:08:15 AM
Topic:If I were Microsoft's Marketing God
Msg #:11265 (In response to 11264)
Prev/Next:11264 / 11266

Explain how every time there's a speed increase, scripting becomes a more attractive way to go.

That's a very important perspective. Distributed processing is really cool.

In 1992, I wrote a Frontier script that managed script calls to FileMaker, HyperCard, and Excel. In each of those three applications, I had intrinsic scripts (or in the case of Excel, macros) that performed internal tasks on data as the data was passed between those applications. Frontier monitored each step of that process and tied everything together as needed.

I timed the manual steps to accomplish the task and it took 25 minutes to process all the activities by hand/mouse movements. When I executed my Frontier script, the same process was completed in less than five minutes.

Not only is scripting faster, it is more accurate when many tedious tasks are involved. That sold me on Frontier and scripting.

I no longer have those scripts I used in 1992. I was using a MacII Cx at the time with a 50MHz accelerator card. I suspect that my performance increase nowadays using a G3/240MHz would be more than five-fold.

XML-RPC and S.O.A.P., goes so much further. It allows cross-platform execution reducing the need to have particular applications run on every platform. The platform becomes invisible with tools like these.

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