Development experience with NetSuite

Question

I've been in discussions with a potential employer with regards to an opportunity wherein their main development framework is NetSuite.

The terms of the project, or so I've told, is that they're in the middle of a project that has to be released by the end of the year (for reference it is September: target release is December). Without revealing too much, the project is an e-commerce site for a media network.

While the opportunity sounds interesting in some respects, I have absolutely no familiarity or idea of how NetSuite works so I'd like to ask for comments, especially regarding the following points:

• Is NetSuite really that badly documented?
• How easy (or hard) would it be to learn it from whatever available code or online examples?
• How big/small and active is the online community? Will it be possible to get prompt responses regarding the framework online?
• Is there any ability to put up unit tests for it?

Perhaps you could help me on whether to even entertain this opportunity or not.

Thanks.

Answer 1

I really don't have much input for you, but if you're looking for a fresh perspective...

The first answer to the SO question you linked would be more than enough for me to want to decline this opportunity. Hearing that much frustration vented by a (former) employee of NetSuite is scary stuff.

Answer 2

Netsuite isn't really a framework. Netsuite is a Software As A Service CRM/ERP/webstore/accounting platform.

They provide SOAP based web services for external integration and javascript for serverside scripting.

As for your specific questions:

1. Documentation isn't too bad but I have had to do a lot of trial and error work.

2. I haven't had too much difficulty. Depends on your starting point.

3. There is a community forum the quality of answers varies.

4. Not really.

See: http://www.netsuite.com/portal/developers/dev-resources.shtml

Answer 3

It's been a while, but I stumbled on this post while maintaining a legacy netsuite app and figured I'd put in my two cents (again).

Netsuite is a pretty terrible development experience if you have any experience with web development.

You can't FTP into your site's files, There is no good source of documentation, so there will be lots of guesswork, and the system is out of date (table based design, no progressive enhancement, etc)

I think it's helpful to non-developers to have all the hand holding, but if you understand scripting languages, html, css, etc. It just gets in your way.

I have moved on to python / django / satchmo for all my current ventures and the development experience has been much nicer

Answer 4

I found, through our own Netsuite implementation, that development for the platform is a mixed bag. To expand on Craig's answers a bit:

1. Documentation is, for the most part, not too bad. The problems I found is that there are unpredictable lapses in the depth of the information you'll find. Some areas are very well documented while others appear documented at first glance but prove to be missing context and detail. As Craig says, this leads to a lot of trial and error. As APIs go, I'd say the documentation was above average.

2. There are two main areas of development in Netsuite: SuiteScript (JavaScript based, used for both server and client-side customization) and SuiteTalk (Netsuite's SOAP web services). I found that, generally speaking, the documentation for SuiteScript was better, but had less available sample code, while the opposite was true of SuiteTalk. That said, no one on my team had too much pain learning from the examples given.

3. As Craig said, the online community is fairly active and a good number of the questions I came across were either already answered or were identified as outstanding bug in the forums. The level of response I got to my own questions was a bit hit and miss, though.

4. Not that I could see, no. Testing was the biggest problem, and it gets worse after implementation. When it comes to SuiteScript, you can pull an entire Script file out of deployed into test status pretty easily, but once you're live, it's likely that you're just adding a method to a needed production file. Because of this, testing tends to require a lot of if-statement juggling to only execute sections of code for you, the developer. It was a pain.