23 February 2007

No Love for my "Web Command Prompt" project?

I was cleaning up my documents in my computer earlier and I noticed one personal project that I personally felt worthy but for some reasons, people never took much interests in it.  I've always wondered why aren't there anybody else who can see the usefulness of this project?

Basically, it is a JavaScript "web command prompt" project. A basic bare bone example can be seen here on my "web command prompt" project home page

 In this bare bone example, you can execute commands such as "clear" (to clear the screen), "enable debug" (to see my internal debugging message in another window")  "open http://www.slashdot.com" (to open a random website, in this example, it's slashdot.com)

Because I know by hard code pre-defined commands will simply be boring, to make this project useful, I have to allow developer to easily define their own command and what the commands do, so I designed the framework to be "pluggable" where developers are able to plug-in their own commands and do whatever they want.  I like to brag it as the web command prompt version of the eclipse environment.

Take this Ajax one for example,  I hooked up several commands to execute the backend .net classes using ajax. It's a web traffic stats monitor tool, commands like  "webstats top visitors" will hit my backend classes which in return will query my IIS logs and return a list of visitors who visited my sites most often. There are some other commands on that page that pulls different statistics as well, but the ideas remains the same.

If you are doing ajax (especially if did AjaxPro ajax), you know how certain JavaScript function can call your backend class right? well, this is no different. You simply provide your commands and their associated ajax functions, the rest is taken care by the framework like generating your output to the screen and what not. (okay maybe it's not that easy, but it's really simple) You can view an example of how to write the plug-in here.

My original intention of this project is to monitor log files on the remote server in real time. My .NET application used log4net to generate log files, so I wanted to monitor the output on the remote server without the need to FTP in and download the log files to view manually.  Implement something like the Unix "tail" commands where I can see the log output in reverse order. Of course, all this requires a bit ajax magic, but it's really no harder than the traditional ajax way provided the command prompt itself handles most of the rendering.

Anyhow, it has been several month and even I forgot about it because it wasn't generating much traffic. However, I will start the v2 of the project where I'm going to look for another JavaScript framework as the base library (Currently, I'm using Atlas JavaScript library, unfortunately, it doesn't support safari). The requirement of the JavaScript library must give me the following abilities.

1. Namespace support
2. Inheritance
3. Interface
4. Load other JavaScript libraries.

I'm still researching around for the best fit. Dojo seems to provide all this, but it feels a little heavy for me, once I find one that suits me, I will begin v2 regardless how many people like it or not out there.  In the past year, I've developed a project management application with my fellow designer friend (soon to be released), so I hope the v2 command prompt will later be an additional asset to the application (for viewing application errors, users who are online and what not).

If there are anybody out there who would like to help me on this, it's greatly appreciated it. The source code is hosted on GoogleCode which can be found here.






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