Tuesday, September 29, 2009
NiXPS View 3.0 features: Scripting
An exciting new addition to NiXPS View v3.0 is its ability to run scripts.
Granted, this is a fairly technical feature, but it can be very useful to extend the NiXPS View applications with more 'vertical' features.
Scripting is essentially programming, so to a certain degree you need to be a 'computer geek' to be able to grok how to do this. But scripting has a fairly low barrier of entry. Especially if the scripting is based on something relatively ubiquitous Javascript.
Javascript powers virtually all websites around the internet, and chances are that if you ever had a go at building your own website, that you have encountered, and even tried writing, a Javascript.
Fact is: Javascript is fairly easy to learn and use, and if technology is not really your thing, which is very possible, than it isn't hard to find someone with the technical ability required to hack together a decent script.
We leverage our NiXPS SDK in the scripting environment, and together with some hooks for the application, one can build fairly powerful scripts which very little coding.
To aid the development of scripts, we have started a wiki where we give a small introduction to how to get around making scripts for NiXPS View v3.0. You can find this at http://nixps.com/scripting.
We are big proponents of 'learning by example', and for this we are posting example scripts on the wiki. This is a great way to experiment, and get the hang of writing small scripts.
And for technical help you could also post your question on the NiXPS mailing list
One of the first scripts that we are posting in the example section is a script that performs XPS imposition.
I'm going to write a bit more about this in a next blog post. ¶ 14:01
An exciting new addition to NiXPS View v3.0 is its ability to run scripts.
Granted, this is a fairly technical feature, but it can be very useful to extend the NiXPS View applications with more 'vertical' features.
Scripting is essentially programming, so to a certain degree you need to be a 'computer geek' to be able to grok how to do this. But scripting has a fairly low barrier of entry. Especially if the scripting is based on something relatively ubiquitous Javascript.
Javascript powers virtually all websites around the internet, and chances are that if you ever had a go at building your own website, that you have encountered, and even tried writing, a Javascript.
Fact is: Javascript is fairly easy to learn and use, and if technology is not really your thing, which is very possible, than it isn't hard to find someone with the technical ability required to hack together a decent script.
We leverage our NiXPS SDK in the scripting environment, and together with some hooks for the application, one can build fairly powerful scripts which very little coding.
To aid the development of scripts, we have started a wiki where we give a small introduction to how to get around making scripts for NiXPS View v3.0. You can find this at http://nixps.com/scripting.
We are big proponents of 'learning by example', and for this we are posting example scripts on the wiki. This is a great way to experiment, and get the hang of writing small scripts.
And for technical help you could also post your question on the NiXPS mailing list
One of the first scripts that we are posting in the example section is a script that performs XPS imposition.
I'm going to write a bit more about this in a next blog post. ¶ 14:01
