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Rapid Open Source Development for the Unix Console?
Adam Weiss asks: "With Web Interfaces and GUIs being all the rage these days, it seems hard to find much about console application development. Web Interfaces and GUIs look pretty and impress people, but I've noticed that it's awfully hard to beat the speed of a well trained operator on a well designed console interface. Some of the HR folks at work use a console app to access employee records while others use a Windows GUI. The console folk can lookup and update three records in the time it takes the the GUI folk to clicky-clicky through one. So, are there any mature Open Source toolkits that would enable rapid development of console applications. Sure, there's curses, but that's low level pain in the arse. I'm talking like something that is specifically designed for building database applications- kinda like an extensible version of Microsoft Access Forms for the green screen. Something that's pretty easy for the simple stuff, but lets you break out and get complicated if you need to. (unlike Access) I know there's gotta be plenty of obsolete commercial stuff that makes these kinds of projects easy. I just want to know if there are any Open Source alternatives that are somewhat modern and well maintained."
misread the title as "Rabid open source development"...
Links is a text-based web browser - building a console interface can be very simple using HTML and Links - you don't have to play with ncurses' mess.
The problem with GUI speed is not so much caused by design - it's the darn mouse that slows down everything... instead of doing a simple Ctrl-S to save, it's all these 6 steps (or more!):
Turbovision was an old Borland library for DOS, with C and Pascal bindings, which addressed the niche you're looking for. There's supposedly a free port to Unix. I can't vouch for it personally, but check out this Freshmeat project page.
But my grandest creation, as history will tell,
Was Firefrorefiddle, the Fiend of the Fell.
I will never understand why people feel the need to use big words just to make themselves sound smarter. Case in point, saying "Rapid Open Source Development for the Unix Console" when what they really mean is "Perl".
Actually, this isn't far off...
Project Builder does have templates for console applications, and if you don't use cocoa (IE, stick to libc and posix libs) the resulting code is quite portable to a regular unix system (although you'll have to write your own makefile).
The best part about it is that PB can be extended with new templates, including console program templates. I'm sure someone out there has already created a few and released them as a free download. You may need to spend some time developing console templates for separate "RAD" tasks, but in the end it'd save you a lot of time.
- Cloud
Do the gui users have to point and click? It should be a pretty trivial task to make the gui useable point and click and keyboard navigable.
If the same amount of time and effort was spent making the gui ergonomic and "keyboard accessible", I suspect that you would find that their speeds were about equivalent.
A long time ago I read a book called "About Face." It was a book on user interface design by the guy who created Visual Basic (I think). Now don't discredit the book because its associated with a VB guy. From what I remember there weren't any code samples it was all theory. Basically it was talking about all the things your average GUI programmer was doing wrong back then. One idea that stuck in my head was that often people make the mistake of writing one screen to both view/edit and input data. The idea was that data input screens need to be designed for speed and efficiency but this layout is ugly and cumbersome when trying to view or edit a record. A manager of a data entry department at a local company in cincy said that everytime his people have to take their hands away from the keyboard and use the mouse he loses 3 seconds. So if you design a GUI screen that doesn't require the mouse, has lots of short cut keys and other conveniences like auto tabbing to the next field when the current field reaches the required amount of characters you should be able to achieve just as much throughput as a console app.
In Republican America phones tap you.
Web Interfaces and GUIs look pretty and impress people, but I've noticed that it's awfully hard to beat the speed of a well trained operator on a well designed console interface
The key phrase here is a well trained operator. GUIs are pretty, and can be slow, but almost anyone can plop their butts down and start working on it immediately. Console apps, fast as they are, require sometimes days of training before working on it, then weeks (or months) of experience before getting truely fast at it.
This tradeoff is what businesses look for, and if its a spot with a high turnover ratio, they don't want to throw money away on training. Sometimes its just better to make it more user friendly than speedy.
I just wanted that point to come across for why companies go for web design. Right now I'm putting a J2EE front-end on a mainframe backend for a company to trade a 2 week training class to a 1 day relaxed training class to operate the software. It is something where speed is desirable, but web speed isn't that slow for the internal app.
Good quote, too many chars. Seriously, the slashdot 120 char limit sucks!
The Informix 4gl environment. x4gl is pretty common there's even a GPL version Aubit
Oracle forms
Adabas Natural
I worked for a number of years developing case tools. I saw the tools used to great effect and also saw complete disasters caused by them. As long as you work within the confines of the tool everything will be quick and robust. Try and get clever and you might as well not use a case tool. The important word is TOOL not CASE.
A well-designed GUI app is not necessarily less efficient to use than a well-designed console app. The problem is that many GUI apps, especially custom-written apps or vertical apps, are based on the horrible "forms" or "screens" paradigm, where the app is just a series of screens, each with lots of fields. (And all web-based apps are like this so I also classify them as "horrible", despite (or maybe because) the fact that I currently write web-based apps for a living (because that's what people like to pay for).)
In fact, given talented UI (GUI or console) designers and application developers, I'd guess that a GUI app could be more efficient to use than a console app at least 75% of the time.
And of course, a well-designed GUI app should be easier to learn than a console app almost 100% of the time.
You're kidding. That's a horrible idea. How do you implement keyboard shortcuts in links/lynx? How do you do menus and stuff like that? Not to mention the additional security headaches involved in writing web interfaces...
What this person wants to do is get over his leetness and learn to make a GUI application that behaves how he/she thinks a console app should work. There's no reason you can't bind keys the exact same way in a GUI that you would in a console app. And really, a console app created with something like curses is a GUI. Just not a very sophisticated one. A true command line application accepts lines in and spits lines out without mocking up a pathetic GUI using ASCII.
I do not have a signature
I know other people have said it, but let me give more concrete examples.
Keys can be associated with every field on the screen. The convention is to mark those keys with an underscore (prefacing the desired key with '&' in the label definition on most GUI systems), and CTRL-thatkey will jump to that box.
Reasonable default values are another key to console-app speed, and there's absolutely no reason why they can't show up in GUI apps either. In fact it's almost exactly the same amount of work.
The GUI has other advantages over console use as well, because of the wider array of widgets you can use. A notebook tab interface is easy to write in a GUI, but I doubt many console libraries make it quite as easy. (There may be isolated counterexamples.) Tab navigation is usually as easy as a keypress, CTRL-PgUp (mozilla) or CTRL-Tab (wxWindows tab control, some exceptions in wxGTK if certain widgets are included in a tab that might eat the CTRL-Tab) for instance. The ability to embed things into the GUI display might be useful.
I'd suggest going GUI and just being very methodical about making shortcuts for everything (and showing them on the screen).
Failing that, if you have time to learn it I'd suggest building the app in Emacs, or at least looking at it, along with the Lynx+web suggestions I've seen.
This is actually a pretty good Ask Slashdot, for a change.
I know exactly what you want -- something like a text-based Hypercard...a front-end building toolkit. Also, the insight that computer operators tend to be significantly faster with text-based UIs is interesting.
Suggestions have included text-based web browsers (not really ideal...I think what the guy's thinking of is a screen-by-screen interface where there's no scrolling or anything, much like those custom DOS apps that banks use) and perl (AFAIK, perl will let you enter lines but doesn't natively have a great text-based UI tookit). I don't think any of these are really appropriate.
You may want to look at dialog. It's a GPLed higher-level toolkit that sits on ncurses that ships with (at least) Red Hat. This is probably simpler than what you want, though, and I don't believe it has a drag-and-drop-ish interface. That means you can't "draw" the forms, like you can with common GUI tools.
Another package, which is probably about as powerful as what you want, is newt (ships with RH and made by them, don't have an URL). The problem is that while this is a relatively high-level widget interface, it *still* isn't to the point of drawing your interface -- it requires coding. It's LGPLed.
May we never see th
That is, a continuous input stream that fills into the screens as they return data.
Go watch a few good travel agents sometime. They start their query, know what options are on successive screens, and are entering their choices before the screens even draw. Having seen those screens ten thousand times they have them memorized.
So, there might be 5 navigation steps to get to a desired screen but they don't see those 5 screens, they enter the navigation keypresses all while the second screen is drawing, which immediately is cleared as the next is drawn, etc, even if that stream is some weird string like 'R,N,1,3,F9'.
Now, one may argue that a good GUI would eliminate all those navigation steps by placing all the options on one, more dense, higher resolution, screen. Yet, in a complex system, not every element can be crammed on one screen, so there is still navigation that needs to be done, and the lack of type-ahead comes back to be a problem. Also, on an infinitely large screen the user takes an infinitely large amount of time to acquire his target, so every useful system of any complexity has to be multi-level.
There's also the issue of the keyboard being a much faster means of data entry than a mouse for certain types of data.
Plus, most terminals are of very low complexity and can be implemented to draw just as fast as their line speed allows. This compares favorably with, say, a web page full of DHTML, JS, CSS, and applets. Even a plain-old-html page often renders more slowly today because the browsers have to be capible of rendering so much more they're built on far more complex object models, which take time to process.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
... Examples are vim, emacs, word, mozilla.... The problem is that he has probably run across the GUIs for kde and gnome and many of the unix GUIs that are out there, where keybord shortcuts are an after thought.
;-)
The problem with emacs is that everything but the keyboard shortcuts were an afterthought....
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