
Webshell.io - airnomad
http://webshell.io/
======
NinetyNine
Interacting and exploring APIs is either the newest fad or a gold rush for new
business, but one of the biggest things stopping me from using them is
integration into my existing stable tools. webshell.io is another service
which is hosting your code on an external service, leaving you vulnerable to
fluctuations in their uptime or stability as a company. There may be new
opportunities in turning this into a desktop application.

~~~
mehdim
But what would be the business model for such a desktop app?

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cmelbye
Selling licenses, like most commercial desktop applications.

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mehdim
Very long sales processes but yes. It is better to be a Salesforce-like
platform... How Salesforce did to enforce a cloud platform as a SPOF for CRM?

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cmelbye
Eh, how so? Put in your credit card details, and the download starts.

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mehdim
sorry but no download with Salesforce, (following my request) and they are
still SPOF for CRM right?

But yes for a desktop you are right. "credit card details and download"

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sentiental
I appreciate the technical rigor required to make this kind of service stable
and safe, but I am worried about the usefulness of the product / who would use
it. Building APIs into my own abstractions in a real web application basically
means I'll never use this myself. A more casual developer may use this to
build simple mashups, or maybe hack out something for a hackathon, but beyond
that why would I go through the trouble of figuring out how to integrate
webshell with my own codebase? NinetyNine already mentioned this, but now I'm
adding a new single point of failure and another web request, so I'm not quite
sure how big the benefit is exactly.

Maybe it'll turn out that there's a huge need for some intermediate between
IFTTT and vanilla API use, but I'm having a hard time seeing when.

~~~
mehdim
IFTTT for developers? with all I/O that API can really provide and the whole
expressivity of Javascript for making more advanced scripts?

~~~
mehdim
A micro-service (or micro-API)creation by scripting existing APIs, in
Javascript?

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primaryobjects
I played with it @ <http://webshell.io/prototype/Njc5Z/7>

It seems to work. This uses a REST service I recently wrote in node.js +
mongodb.

Edit:

14 people click the link and hit Run, but no one changes the text? Come on. I
wrote a second little app to track this at
<http://webshell.io/prototype/Njc5Z/8> just keep clicking Run to see it
update, as people run the original app and hopefully enter their name or
something.

~~~
primaryobjects
Wow, 249 added. And a friendly mix of script injection, iframes, css, and
image tags (had to disable the inline script tags because the redirects made
people unable to see the data). Someone even changed the background image of
the Webshell.IO interface itself.

It might be a good idea for the webshell guys to add some basic xss
protection, but otherwise, I think we've proven this is a neat idea.

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gojomo
Finally, a shell that has the past trail off below (revchron/blog-style)
rather than up above (typewriter/terminal-style)!

~~~
moe

      printed in any other way...
      would want their shell output
      I never understood why anyone
    
      Yes, what a great innovation!

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gojomo
You may jest, but the traditional ordering, appending later material/writing
to the bottom, is an artifact of the mechanics of handwriting and then typing-
on-paper.

On screens, freshest/latest-on-top makes more sense, and is just as easy to
effect. Inherently online forms, like blogs and newsfeeds, have already
inverted their preferred mapping of time-to-vertical-position. I predict many
interactive shells and chatrooms will also invert soon.

    
    
      !reverse might sentences individual within order word 
      the even maybe years hundred a In ?knows Who

~~~
scott_karana
There's a lot of validity to what you say, but unfortunately this paradigm
breaks because most languages are top-to-bottom. As much as I'd love a bottom
to top shell history for the reasons you describe, I'd end up scrolling in a
zig-zag elevator pattern to read the command outputs.

This is of course not a criticism, just an observation.

~~~
gojomo
'Languages are top to bottom', yes, but only _because_ of the legacy mechanics
of handwriting and then typewriter-rolls. (Hands or mechanism would obscure
any lower text.)

As each generation spends more time with keyboarded/gestural/voice inputs for
flexible screens, the old mechnical habit – append new at-bottom – will fade,
with more applications embracing new-item (and new-line-insert) at-top.

Regarding shells, do you mean your eye _tracking_ would have to zig-zag? If
so, imagine a completely inverted shell/terminal, at the unit of individual
lines. You'd only have to scrollbar-back in the exact same situations as in a
classic terminal: when more than one screen of output resulted. And your eye
tracking for smaller bursts of output will require the same reversals and
vertical-magnitudes as before: just in the opposite direction. So once you
habituate to the inversion, the differences that remain are:

(1) 'up' means 'newer', consistent with other screen-native scrollable
information feeds

(2) your eyes' 'home row' stays near the top of your screen – closer to
looking at the world above the screen, rather than the hands/keyboard/ground
below

Both these seem like wins to me... far from slam-dunks, but enough to chip,
chip, chip away at the traditional language practices over time.

~~~
moe
I think what you're missing is that terminal output is nothing like the
disjunct messages on twitter (and even there the inversion is terrible) but
rather like the sentences of a novel.

We don't just "habituate to" reading backwards while everything else in the
world still reads top-down.

And for that reason you don't break fundamental conventions like our _natural
reading direction_ that have evolved over centuries unless you have a tad bit
less ridiculous justification than "looking at the world above the screen".

~~~
gojomo
The next few generations will spend their entire lives reading and writing
material exclusively for the screen, rather than paper. After that, I wouldn't
even count on novels remaining earlier-writing-on-top. Pull-down/scroll-up for
next will seem more of a 'natural reading direction' than habits based on
quaint ink and paper – despite paper habits' several-thousand-years' head-
start.

Let's check back in 100 years, we'll see who's right.

~~~
moe
100 years?

We've been reading top-down for well over 2000 years, since the very
beginnings of writing, in almost all languages. If you really believe twitter
and touchscreen-gadgets will overthrow that in not even one generation then
you should absolutely share some of the kraut that you are smoking over there.

~~~
gojomo
150 years ago, horse-drawn transport was the primary means of non-human-
powered land transport... and had been for over 4,000 years. But by 50 years
ago, not so much.

When a truly new technology arrives, things change a lot in just a few
generations, with 'generation' meaning the 20-30 year average gap from birth
to being a child-rearing adult.

~~~
moe
Ok. So we have computers now, a truly new technology. And thus we will soon
collectively decide that writing backwards is better because then we can look
at the world above our screen better.

Yes, on second thought this is absolutely comparable to the invention of
horseless carriage and makes perfect sense.

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micheljansen
Cool idea, but this desperately needs a better way to deal with history. I
mistyped

    
    
      apis.tts("hello world");
    

as

    
    
      api.tts("hello world");
    

and then I hit the up arrow (as this is how to go back to the last command on
any other console I have every tried) and nothing happened. In fact, the only
way to correct my mistake, seemed to be to __retype the whole thing __. I
couldn't have come up with a better example of "dangling by a trivial feature"
(<http://prog21.dadgum.com/160.html>).

~~~
zer
Try it with alt-up/down, works for me in Chrome.

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woah
I'd like to commend them for an awesome interactive tutorial.

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adsahay
Reminds me of YQL (<http://developer.yahoo.com/yql/>) - one of the more
underrated things by Yahoo for developers.

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bazookaBen
you need an "up" key to repeat the last api call.

~~~
mehdim
alt+up or alt+down

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jQueryIsAwesome
Please add autocomplete, it would make it so much easier to work with;
something like the Chrome console.

