[jboss-as7-dev] cli

[Alexey Loubyansky]

I'd like to give a status update on what I've done so far, collect some 
feedback and get a sense of direction for the roadmap.

So, so far it's a primitive thing. There is a script jboss-admin.sh(bat) 
under the JBOSS_HOME/bin. It starts a cli as a module (I found it easier 
this way).

First thing to do is to connect to the server. It's done with

/connect [host]:[port]

Default host is localhost, default port is 9999.

BTW, for the list of supported commands type /help. Besides /connection 
and /help there are /quit and /prefix.

Anything that doesn't start with '/' is considered an operation request. 
Operation requests are currently following the format:

[node-type=node-name [, node-type=node-name]*] : operation-name 
([name=value [, name=value]*])

e.g. 
profile=production,subsystem=threads,bounded-queue-thread-pool=pool1:write-core-threads(count=0, 
per-cpu=20)

Whitespaces between separators are insignificant.
If the address part is not specified then the ':' before the operation 
name is optional.
If the operation has no arguments then the brackets '()' are optional.

So, if we are at the root, just 'read-resource' will work.

The result of the operation for now is logged by invoking toString() on 
it, so it's formatted as on the wiki.

About the /prefix command (it has an alias '/to'). It's an analogue of 
the 'cd'. I.e. It specifies a node path prefix for an operation request 
before it gets executed. E.g.

/to subsystem=logging
read-resource

will be equivalent to subsystem=logging:read-resource executed from the 
root.

It's also possible to end the prefix on the node type, e.g.
/to subsystem
logging:read-resource

will be equivalent to the above.

/to ~ - means go to the root.
'..' - go to the parent node.
.type - go to the node type of the current node.

/prefix (or /to) w/o arguments will print the current prefix value. BTW, 
the prefix is not verified to be a valid one (except from the syntax 
point of view). If the prefix is wrong the operations will fail, of course.

That's about it for now. So, we talked a bit today with Emanuel and Max 
about it. To improve usability we thought of adding:
- some sort of autocompletion (for the commands, node types/names, 
operations);
- having higher level management commands on top of the operation 
requests, to avoid the verbose syntax of the operation requests for some 
common things like deploy/undeploy, add a datasource, etc.
- use the jline for the input (currently it's BufferedReader.readLine()).

Any other ideas, suggestions?

BTW, it's currently in my detyped2 branch.

Thanks,
Alexey