Comments on: GUI’s and Open Source http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2004/02/23/guis-and-open-source/ News, opinion, and fresh thinking for web developers and designers. The official podcast of sitepoint.com. Fri, 05 Dec 2008 02:18:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.5 By: Nick Aghazarian http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2004/02/23/guis-and-open-source/#comment-4516 Nick Aghazarian Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000 1025939787#comment-4516 <p>I started working for a company that had a software package on the IBM system 36 and 38. Six months into my job, we received a "beta" copy of the new offering from IBM called an AS/400. The AS/400 has a full command line interface, as well as a fairly nice menuing system (this came by combining the best parts of both the systems 36 and the 38).<br /> The command line was much faster to use, if you knew what you were doing. One benefit of the system was the ability to prompt for a command, which would bring up a screen with a text description of each command, and often, a list of possible values. Better yet, once you finished typing in the parameters, you could hit a key and see what the command line version will be.<br /> Just like most shells, there was a retrieval key to bring back previously entered commands, so you could also exectue the command from the prompt, and then retrieve the command to see what you could have typed in.<br /> With a tool like that, learning the command line tools was not only reasonably easy, it bordered dangerously on fun (which should never happen at work).</p> <p>Wouldn't it be cool to have a shell with a tool like that?</p> I started working for a company that had a software package on the IBM system 36 and 38. Six months into my job, we received a “beta” copy of the new offering from IBM called an AS/400. The AS/400 has a full command line interface, as well as a fairly nice menuing system (this came by combining the best parts of both the systems 36 and the 38).
The command line was much faster to use, if you knew what you were doing. One benefit of the system was the ability to prompt for a command, which would bring up a screen with a text description of each command, and often, a list of possible values. Better yet, once you finished typing in the parameters, you could hit a key and see what the command line version will be.
Just like most shells, there was a retrieval key to bring back previously entered commands, so you could also exectue the command from the prompt, and then retrieve the command to see what you could have typed in.
With a tool like that, learning the command line tools was not only reasonably easy, it bordered dangerously on fun (which should never happen at work).

Wouldn’t it be cool to have a shell with a tool like that?

]]> By: psp http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2004/02/23/guis-and-open-source/#comment-4517 psp Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000 1025939787#comment-4517 <p>GUI configuration tools are all well and good for individual use, but the greatest advantage of text based configuration is that it can be kept in a revision controlled repository. This allows for accountability, revision control, ease of rollback and (very importantly) commenting of what has been done/changed and why. Self documenting configs are a god-send. Probably why IIS in Windows 2003 server stores it's config in an XML file which can be rolled back ;-)</p> GUI configuration tools are all well and good for individual use, but the greatest advantage of text based configuration is that it can be kept in a revision controlled repository. This allows for accountability, revision control, ease of rollback and (very importantly) commenting of what has been done/changed and why. Self documenting configs are a god-send. Probably why IIS in Windows 2003 server stores it’s config in an XML file which can be rolled back ;-)

]]> By: bwarrene http://www.sitepoint.com/blogs/2004/02/23/guis-and-open-source/#comment-4518 bwarrene Wed, 31 Dec 1969 19:00:00 +0000 1025939787#comment-4518 <p>Excellent point on cvs and revision control of configuration files. That might be a topic worth expanding into one of my SitePoint columns...any thoughts or feedback on that..?</p> Excellent point on cvs and revision control of configuration files. That might be a topic worth expanding into one of my SitePoint columns…any thoughts or feedback on that..?

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