[146933] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Network device command line interfaces
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jay Ashworth)
Mon Nov 28 14:04:19 2011
Date: Mon, 28 Nov 2011 14:03:12 -0500 (EST)
From: Jay Ashworth <jra@baylink.com>
To: NANOG <nanog@nanog.org>
In-Reply-To: <CAE05tDJsA-kxvqT9NCWGAB+zfWjbi91BHQ_hP-+Bw3QHwurC3g@mail.gmail.com>
Errors-To: nanog-bounces+nanog.discuss=bloom-picayune.mit.edu@nanog.org
----- Original Message -----
> From: "James Jones" <james@freedomnet.co.nz>
> Well said. I write scripts all day long to perform automation on networking
> equipment. A device needs to have a CLI, but if you have a GUI too make for
> darn sure that I can access all features in either one.
It is a relatively well established (though not always *followed*) principle
of software design that you should build a CLI that can do everything, and
then *build your GUI on top of that*. Among other things, this design pattern
makes it easy to capture the commands generated by a GUI session, and script
them for later use.
Cheers,
-- jra
--
Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com
Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100
Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII
St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274
