I understand that the company doesn’t want mass-market consumers to feel overburdened or confused by technical options, and that they don’t want to define core as the primary SmartThings rules engine for that reason.
I have a new suggestion. (Besides putting @ady624 on payroll )
Officially publish it, but call it a “scripting language.” It’s complex enough to be one. Something like:
Developers can use the CoRE scripting language to handle complex stacked conditionals and extend basic SmartThings functionality to advanced levels.
That way people can be alerted to its existence without having to find the forums first, those with the technical background can jump right in, and those who don’t want to deal with complexity will still understand why it exists.
I love the effort they have put in to make CoRE- but in order to call it a scripting language…, i’d have to be able to write scripts which run against it… Which would be sweet… but as far as I know, you have to use the UI to create rules…?
We are working closely with @ady624 to publish CoRE already. I don’t see a need for any special language or wordsmithing. Just call it what it is. A rules engine.
To confirm what Tim is saying, ST is - and I thank them for this - very very careful and spending resources to ensure CoRE keeps working. There’s already been about 3 instances in which ST refrained from a software update because it would have broken CoRE. As we speak, ST had to rewrite code of their own to prevent CoRE from breaking. The “breaking” has to do with the class size that CoRE has reached, near the 64kB per class imposed by JVM (this is a hard limitation of Java and cannot be “fixed”). The class size is shared between the CoRE code and the base class code by ST. This means that if I add anything to CoRE, it gets too big and stops working, but also if ST adds anything to the base class, CoRE gets too big and stops working. So they’re reworking some of the base class code to make sure CoRE keeps going. How’s that for support? And funny thing is, most users don’t or won’t ever know ST is actually making a huge effort in the background to keep their automation working.