Just how hard is creating a plug in?

[pat_smith1969]

I have not yet purchased Sage yet (waiting on payday) but have completed a 15 day trial. I wish to move over to Sage from MCE and am upset I will need to give up my "My Movies 2" application.

I have asked around and there are no current plugins that work like My Movies 2 (though there are some with similar functionality they do not rely on using a database to maintain movie lists, cover art, and genre data). In short in my 15 day trial I did not find a plug in that is close enough to MM2. I have seen, however, several requests for a MM2 conversion tool but no one wants to build it.

Having said all that my question is just how hard is it to make one myself? I am a system administrator (so I am NOT a programmer) but have done some minor programming before. I even made an ASP web page that parses the MM2 database and lists what movies I own on my personal web page, so I am very familiar with the db structure.

Is this the kind of thing where if I read the turtorial and do some other research I can do myself? Or does it require years of C# or Java code experience?

[GKusnick]

I have no idea what MM2 does so I can't say how much work it would be to create a plugin that does the same. But "how much work" is not quite the same thing as "how hard". Obviously a big plugin with lots of features is going to take more hours of coding than a small, simple plugin. But the API and the Studio coding tools are pretty flexible, so there's not much that can't be done one way or another.

As far as learning curve goes, if you have a reasonable amount of experience with VBScript, JScript, ASP, or the like, you should be able to pick up the basics of Studio coding in fairly short order. If your plugin does enough heavy computation that you want to drop into Java, then experience with compiled programming languages would be a big plus. In either case, it helps a lot if you're good at browsing API docs and looking up information on your own.