Caché WebTerminal v4 Release
Greetings, InterSystems community!
I am pleased to announce that the web terminal project, Caché WebTerminal version 4 gets its release! After long period of enhancing this web application from 2013, it came to the version 4, which features major stability and security improvements, intelligent autocomplete and syntax highlighting, convenient SQL mode and a lot of other useful features.
The goal of this article is to spread the knowledge about this project over the InterSystems community.
Caché WebTerminal is a web-based terminal for InterSystems products built on top of InterSystems Caché. The power of this project is not only in projecting the standard terminal utility onto the browser. WebTerminal is a flexible tool that can be easily embedded into any other projects, used on mobile devices and vastly enhance the user experience.
History
The development of the first version of WebTerminal project started in 2013, during my first internship in InterSystems corporation in Russia (it was the closest office to my homeland, Ukraine). From that time WebTerminal project grew up a lot and found its place across the InterSystems corporation and its partners, who had noticed this project on InterSystems-RU GitHub and some other resources, or just by Googling.
Now WebTerminal is used around the world. It was embedded to InterSystems IDEL (Interactive Development Environment for Learning) project, Caché Visual Editor project, to the Atom-based Caché Studio and is mostly used by developers for the development in local and remote environments.
The analytics shown below demonstrates the interest in WebTerminal GitHub repository page views on intersystems-ru GitHub by users for the past days:
* Presented analytics is not precise and demonstrates only approximate data.
Features
Caché WebTerminal project has its own homepage, and you can find the full list of its features there. The list below summarizes the most important ones.
● Terminal In The Browser
Just enter the URL of the server you need to connect to, and use it from the browser. No need to install any software. The simplest way to share the developer access to your server. It's safe.
● Terminal For Mobile Devices
As well as for desktop browsing, you can use mobile device to perform operations.
● Intelligent Autocomplete
WebTerminal understands the context and suggests the endings for you: class names, class method and instance method names, variables in current context, their properties and more.
● Clever Syntax Highlighting
WebTerminal highlights Caché ObjectScript and SQL code not just by keywords, analyzing the structure of the command and giving the intelligent highlighting.
● Embedded SQL Mode
No need to switch so often to SQL shell — WebTerminal has embedded SQL mode which renders native HTML table with output.
● Tracing Globals / Files And Remembering Commands
Using WebTerminal's special commands you can start to track changes in Globals or files, save frequently used commands, etc.
● Customizable
WebTerminal can be customized to match your needs.
● Embeddable
WebTerminal can be embedded to any other web applications and is configurable with URL parameters.
Description, Documentation and Downloads
If you are interested in WebTerminal project, you can find out more information on the project's page. There is a rich documentation tab explaining how to install and use WebTerminal.
The installation process is easy: you just need to download and import the XML file to your Caché system. Then you will have the web application set up automatically. To restrict the access to this web application for particular users, or to solve any problems during the installation please refer to the related documentation section. If there are any cases not covered by docs, submit your case to the project's issue tracker.
Caché WebTerminal is an open-source project, and anybody is welcome to join for its development on InterSystems GitHub. Feel free to submit any bugs or features requests to the project's issue tracker. Check the contributing section in docs to get some ideas of what you can help or start with.
We would be glad to see any feedback on this project! There are a lot of things can be done to enhance WebTerminal usage experience, and there are still some things that need to be done, but the project is live and please do not hesitate to submit any problems or request for extending WebTerminal's functionality or API.
Thanks and enjoy using WebTerminal!