Portofino-cli

[Joe Kirchner]

Alessio

It is exciting to hear about the development of Portofino-cli in its infancy and your openness to suggestions for direction. Here is my thought.

Often CLI tools are used for application administration and settings. That is good, but I also like to use them for production activities. Here is an example. I am interested in sailing and was looking to purchase a 30+ foot boat ... that is about 10 meters on your side of the pond. (-:

I would spend hours looking through Craig's List and ebay for used boats. But I want a fast boat and there are so many boat designs out there that I spent a lot of time looking up their speed using the PHRF rating system. Searching a website or even a downloaded spreadsheet took too much time. So, I put the lookup table into postgreSQL and created a bash script, which in turn calls psql, to do a query that lists the ratings. I would call the script with the name or partial name of the boat and it would list all the boats matching the partial name and their corresponding PHRF ratings. It was fast and easy.

So I might see an ad for a Morgan 32. I would type "sailboat Morgan" on my terminal and it would list all the Morgans, their lengths, a few details and their speed rating.

Here my work flow focus is not the database. It is the boat ads. But the ads rarely had objective information about the boat's speed. So I could quickly flip to my terminal, type two words and get that info without losing my train of thought about the beauty, condition, comfort and design features of the boat.

It would take much longer if I were using a full Portofino application.

So, as you imagine the direction of your development of Portofino-CLI, please consider this type of work flow. My example was about getting data ... a select query in SQL. However, I could also imagine a quick data entry query.

For example, in the old days, one would have a roll-a-dex on your desk. That was a wheel that you could spin around and attach cards with contact info. They were about the size of a business card. As I am doing my work, I would come back from a meeting with a few business cards or receive a call from a new contact. If I have to open a special application, and choose a few menu options to get to a page where I do the data entry, I might not do it for one or two names. However, if all I had to do is flip to my terminal and type "add_contact John Smith 301-555-1212 john....@example.com" I might do it without losing momentum in my daily work flow.

OK, that may not have been the best example, because I would probably put new contacts in my phone, but you get the idea.

Thanks for all of your hard work with Portofino over the years!

Cheers,

Joe

[Alessio Stalla]

Hi Joe,

thanks for commenting on portofino-cli :) that project is a bit stale now, because I'm doing it in my free time & I got stuck trying to build a redistributable executable that people can just download & launch.

Your use case is for selected few "power users", but it's definitely the direction I would like to take with portofino-cli in the future. It already works by connecting to a live Portofino instance, so you could use it in production to script some tasks or provide an advanced interface for power users. However, currently its main target are activities related to development, like adding a new db connection, creating new pages, and so on.