Hi, I've been watching the meeting from yesterday and have some questions about the shell. I'll put them all on separate lines to make it easier for people to reply :)
This new shell thing seems to be its own app. How accessible is it for people who can't use a mouse and need to drive it via keyboard only? It looks like an interactive thing like Swift Playgrounds with a timeline history. I'm not clear if that that history list on the left is interactive or if you can edit any of them arbitrarily and re-run them? I can't work out how version control works with this tool. Do we save documents of the timeline that we can reload? If we do, is it a text based format for the saved file? How would this work for production development with a team? It looks like it the shell has its own language, Is it documented? I'm concerned that we're inventing a whole new language off the cuff... Related, how stable is this shell language? If someone writes a script in OWShell, it's likely to continue to work in the future? Are we going to get BC breaks in scripts that people publish (if they can publish them)? It is JS only? i.e. does it exclude people like me who don't understand JS and write their actions in the other languages? I was a bit concerned to hear someone call the export to wsk format as "old school" That implies that there's a plan to deprecate the current CLI and that this OWShell is the new way to write all OpenWhisk applications. Is this correct and if so, is OWShell completely scriptable via bash and Windows PowerShell so that it can be automated? It's neat that you can paste into OWShell, but that's hard to do in CI environment. I'm a bit confused as to the status of this tool. There was mention of a vague hope to OpenSource it, but it didn't sound very concrete or important to the speaker. Is it proprietary to IBM? Will it work with other installations of OpenWhisk? I haven't played with it yet, so maybe these all become obvious in when it's used. More tooling around OpenWhisk is good, so I don't want to sound critical. I suppose my main concerns are that this means that OpenWhisk is going even more heavily towards being a JavaScript only platform and that non-interactive deployments of OpenWhisk applications are being discouraged. Regards, Rob.
