[keycloak-dev] Why does WildFly CLI suck?

[Stan Silvert]

On 5/20/2015 3:44 AM, Stian Thorgersen wrote:
>
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Bill Burke" <bburke at redhat.com>
>> To: keycloak-dev at lists.jboss.org
>> Sent: Tuesday, 19 May, 2015 4:04:17 PM
>> Subject: Re: [keycloak-dev] Why does WildFly CLI suck?
>>
>> CLI is a UI.  Generically rendered UIs generally suck.  For example, did
>> not managing JBoss 4.x and earlier suck using some generic JMX UI
>> renderer?  CLI falls into this category IMO.
> +1 I've never been able to achieve anything without googling for a recipe
>
> The fact that there's alternative commands for doing common tasks suggests that I'm not the only one. For example adding a data-source can be done with:
>
>    /subsystem=datasources/data-source=MigrateDS:add(jndi-name=java:jboss/datasources/MigrateDS, pool-name=MigrateDS, driver-name=h2, connection-url=jdbc:h2:mem:test;DB_CLOSE_DELAY=-1)
>
> or
>    
>    data-source add ...
>
> The first auto-generated one is very hard to use, the whole syntax of the cli is weird in the first place and figuring how to puzzle that together is hopeless.
That's what CLI GUI is for.  It provides a form (with help text) for 
each operation and then constructs the syntax for you.  (And I agree 
that the syntax is a little weird.  I need to ask why they didn't stick 
with plain JSON.)
> The last one is much better, but there's very few of those easy to use commands available.
True.  So both of you seem to be making the point that auto-generated 
UI's tend to suck.  Humans can create a better UI to be consumed by 
humans.  (Of course, sometimes humans create terrible UI's as well)

I think the problem here is one of size.  There are thousands of 
operations in WildFly CLI.  Who is going to create all those 
user-friendly operations?

So my point here is the same as in the earlier discussion about what 
should be in the Keycloak CLI.  Having something is better than having 
nothing.  Customers love the WildFly CLI compared to what was there 
before because before there was no CLI at all.

(Incidentally, a lot of customers apparently liked the old JMX console.  
We got a lot of flak about removing it in WildFly.)
>
>> On 5/19/2015 9:42 AM, Stan Silvert wrote:
>>> I've probably been too involved with it to be objective.  What are the
>>> usability issues?
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>> --
>> Bill Burke
>> JBoss, a division of Red Hat
>> http://bill.burkecentral.com
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