Oh ya... the time is now, all you party people get out on the floor
and shake what your mother gave ya...
This is the *first* _official_ release of GShell... and I invite all
of you to go an have a quick look over the only docs we got at the
moment:
http://cwiki.apache.org/GSHELL
More docs are on there way I can assure you... as well as more
features, functionality and fun with your command-line... aight!
* * *
GShell has been a dream of mine for... er um what seems like years
now... oh wait it has been years. And well, the universe has finally
aligned and things are falling into place quite nicely I'd say. Some
external groups are already consuming these goodies, others have asked
me about it, and there might even been some commercial apps wanting a
simple/easy/kick-ass command-line (remote scriptable) interface to
their application on the horizon too.
If any of you remember the JBucks days, when I whittled Twiddle out of
thin air as a pluggable command-line framework (only realized to
invoke lame JMX muck)... well, GShell is here to carve out its own
notch... or well, I hope it can get sharp enough to cut something. I
think it will... just believe, imagine and well we make dreams reality
her in the land of source which is open... na... aighty.
Keep in mind this is an *alpha-1* release, and is a little rough (or
in some cases more than a little) around the corners. I hope, with
the help, guidance and suggestions of the community, that we can sort
though all of the significant issues and polish GShell off enough to
make it generally mass-consumable by applications (like ServiceMix,
ActiveMQ, and other sister server-orient projects which need a
sophisticated command-line interface for administration,
configuration, whatever).
This version of GShell was inspired a little (okay... a lot) by the
work I've done on the Groovy projects 'groovysh' command-line tool ( http://groovy.codehaus.org/Groovy+Shell
). Actually working on 'groovysh' really helped me to figure out
many things w/GShell... and maybe one day Groovy's 'groovysh' will
actually use GShell as a framework, though there is a bit of work left
in the core to make that a reality. For folks that haven't use my new
'groovysh', you can easily have a look by using the 'groovy-maven-
plugin', as in:
mvn groovy:shell
You'll notice a lot of similarities between 'groovysh' and 'gsh' I'm
sure.
* * *
While working on this release I've come to realize that GShell and
Maven2 are very similar creatures... which I'll elaborate on more in
the future... but because of that significant functionality which is
already implemented in Maven2 is 90% (or sometimes more) compatible
with the direction GShell is headed towards. For example, one feature
alpha-2 will have is to allow command plugins to define 'dependencies'
just as a Maven project does now. And GShell can be configured (a bit
more flexibly than Maven ATM) for how to find those dependencies (in a
local repo, in a remote repo, in some uber-jar, etc). This will all
leverage the maturing Maven2 codebase. So in some ways GShell will
grow with Maven2 as they both become more and more functional, stable,
reliable... and well ass-kicking no doubt.
Um... crap, I'm e-babbling again; sorry. So, lets vote and push this
puppy out already... ?!
+1 Oh ya, come on baby... you know you want it
+0 Um... I don't know what is wrong with batch personally, can't we
just use that?
-1 I like cheese, cheese makes me happy... but damn it cheese won't
let me remotely administer my application... wtf, no way... WAIT!!!!
So, its Friday evening, 6ish PST... so lets say _sometime_ on Tuesday
the 25th I'll call the vote. That is a little more than 72 hours...
so get your #2 pencils out and shake what your mother gave ya...
--jason
