Moving to the new ST-Engine

Question

Hi
We are looking into moving to the new ST-Scripting engine.
We currently have a mix of e-Script (95%) and Siebel VB (5%).
At the moment we are on 7.7.2.6 but we are planning the move to 8.0.
Can anyone share there experience with the new ST-Engine?
What are your lessons learned with the new engine?
Is it really faster? Is it stable or still to buggy?
Axel

Answer 1

Here is some information
Abstract
1-      In 8.0, there are lots of very valuable
features that comes only with ST engine. Those
features alone makes the ST engine upgrade very worthwhile (IMO).
2-      ST engine provides important performance
benefits in addition to the features.
3-      There are live customers on 7.7/7.8 with ST engine.
There is one customer I know of who is already live
on 8.0 with ST engine. This customer achieved, while
using 8.0 ScriptAssist feature
"lower TCO of customization changes" (quote from them).
4-      There are no open P1 defects for ST engine/features
for 8.0.0.2 at this time. Almost all the fixes are
already in previous 8.x code lines or there are
QF's for the important ones. Alerts are also provided
to keep the customers informed.
5-      ST engine may (probably will) require some script
rework because of new compilation warnings, minor
incompatibilities and if you are missing fixes.
6-      There will be a 8.1 feature, Script performance
profiler. This feature, together with St engine, may improve
the application server performance very significantly.
Details
1- Features
Repository based ScriptAssist and compilation:
Greatly accelerates development and upgrade.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B40099_02/books/eScript/eScript_JSLOverview6.html#wp1035312
Fix & Go:
Greatly accelerates debugging by avoding repetitive .srf compilation.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B40099_02/books/eScript/eScript_JSLOverview5.html#wp1035774
Services as Script Libraries:
Enables modular development, improves performance, prevents clumsy InvokeMethod calls, makes
the code shorter and readable.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B40099_02/books/eScript/eScript_JSReference38.html#wp1084973
2- Performance
ST engine performs better in multiuser scenarios.
Tests has shown that on a typical (?), medium scripted
scenarios, with 400 users on a 4 CPU machine;
Overall Application Server CPU usage decreased by around %20
Overall Application Server Memory usage went down by around %10
Overall Application Server response time increased by around %30
To give you an idea about the peak performance difference
the following code runs around 16x faster with ST engine
function bar ()
return 0;
function TestPerformance ()
var i;
var a;
var oStart = new Date ();
for (i = 0 ; i < 1000000 ; i++)
a = bar ();
var oEnd = new Date ();
ReportTime (" " + (oEnd.getTime () - oStart.getTime ()) /1000);
3- I would love to hear more about the customer experience in this forums.
We'll try to make this experience and good as possible. When we've talked to
8.0 live customer, we only focused on very visible features, namely ScriptAssist.
This customer felt this is a very useful feature that helps them write eScript code more easily. They claimed they had made fewer errors through using ScriptAssist and achieved "lower TCO of customization changes" (quote from them).
4- The ST engine has over 600 library functions and hundreds of language features
even supports few undocumented, non-standard features to be downward compatible. We've also added lots of features in 8.0. Many of the early adopters used the engine to the maximum. For them, one single defect was usually a stopper because of the large/complex script code base.
5- Rework
Incompatibilities:
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B40099_02/books/eScript/eScript_JSLOverview4.html#wp1033924
Warnings: The T engine did not have warnings that usually resulted runtime failures. The ST engine
reports them at compile time so that you can fix them faster.
http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/B40099_02/books/eScript/eScript_Troubleshooting5.html#wp1010272
Disclaimer: Opinions are my own. This information provided here is not suitable for anything.