Building an application around MacroScheduler?

[marvinlb]

Has anyone built an entire application around MacroScheduler? I'm looking at a development effort for a data warehousing & reporting application that would consist of:

-GUI for Users, with whatever logic is required for navigation, selection by user of desired reports & options, etc.
-MacroScheduler for execution of script(s) based on the user's work via the GUI
-pre-defined SQL & Reportwriter routines to be "called" by the various MacroScheduler scripts, against the DB.

This approach would leverage MacroScheduler for its scheduling & event monitoring capabilities (others?)

The alternative would be (I suppose) custom development of all GUI, scheduling, & event monitoring (tied to the same pre-defined SQL & Reportwriter routines as described above).

Has anyone taken this route? What are the +/- of this approach?
(development time, performance, maintenance, etc.) in the end, does it save any development time &/or $???

sharing of any & all perspectives experiences would be greatly appreciated.

[Marcus Tettmar]

A number of people have done this.

Keith Passaur of http://www.eDocFile.com talks about using Macro Scheduler to build custom and "shrinkwrap" apps in his podcast here:

Download:
http://www.mjtnet.com/podcasts/edocfile.mp3

Stream:
http://www.mjtnet.com/podcasts/edocfile.m3u

Some of our tools are built with Macro Scheduler and I know of a number of other users who have used Macro Scheduler to build applications that they sell. Assuming they are happy to publicise this fact they will hopefully respond here.

[Phil Pendlebury]

Hi there,

I have successfully built and marketed an application using MS:

http://www.meap.biz/

Not sure how much help I could be but I will gladly contribute to any questions / answers as time permits.

[kpassaur]

I have build numerous applications / utilities with Macro Scheduler.

What I do with MS is call console application or dlls and process the results. The dlls and console applications for the most part I have custom written for me and I have them written so that they have numerous uses.

All of the applications to me are really utilities as they batch process. I think of an application as something that interacts with a user where these are designed to work in the background with virtually no user intervention.

[IanSmith]

I wrote a number of applications for a large bank in the UK a couple of years ago. I was a problem solver for a large roll out, and I used MS to extract security certificates (the problem in the testimonials section), remote into machines to audit data volumes and a number of other wee tasks. I found it to be much faster and easier than using VB, and I made a lot of use of the 'simulated input' features.

Take care, Ian