upgradeable scripting

mellymell

Hi everyone.

I have a question that you may or may not be able to answer, although I hope the former.

I write scripts that I'll be soon selling, and I wanted to know how a person would go about making their scripts easily upgradeable, like through a patch or something. I'm sure that I'll add features to my programs as the months progress, including working out any bugs; so, how does one go about providing upgrades to scripts?

cnperry

You could just replace old versions of files with the new ones and have clients install from a tarfile.

mellymell

Yeah, I thought about that, but I was thinking about clients who customize their programs.... But, I guess that when they customize the script, it's on them to recustomize it.

I guess there's no easy way to make sure that even if it's customized, that the new features can easily be integrated?

Weedpacket

Well, if they customise a script who knows what they could customise it into!

What you could do is separate the customisable bits from the application core; they can do what they like to the customisable bits (which could take the form of templates, configuration files, and suchlike) - much like you can customise Mozilla's UI by messing around with its front end chrome - but they shouldn't touch the core (where all your function libraries and other stuff you want to be able to maintain are kept).

If they do want to customise something in the core it's a sign that you haven't quite separated the two sufficiently; updating the core to handle this new aspect could mean that anyone else using your system (for your own sanity it would be nice if everyone kept up to date!) would probably have to tweak their sites to accommodate the changes.

mellymell

Yeah, I'm using the Smarty templating system now, so they can definitely create whole new template if they want to. It's also multi-language capable, so they can manage what the system prints out from the language file.

Yeah, I guess they wouldn't have a reason to screw around with the actual hard-coded source files... and if they did, I guess it wouldn't be anything I could do to make it easy on them to upgrade no matter what type of upgrade scheme I used.

I think I've done a fairly good job of separating all business logic from all design, so hopefully that will be enough. I guess I was also concerned about if they did create their own templates based on the main templates I supplied, when I updated, possibly adding new functions, I guess I'd have to make a list of all the new template wrappers so they'd know what and how to integrate into their existing templates.

This didn't seem to be a problem with programs like phpBB. I wonder what they did to make the upgrading process so seemingly easy.