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.

[tluyben2]

I would just allow for testing and building online ; want to run on your own server, just click export, pay something (or have a subscription) and there you go. Of course you open source the api wrappers completely to get more people using them outside your platform.

[mehdim]

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

[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?

[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.

[steeve]

Updated version to use arguments: http://webshell.io/prototype/Njc5Z/14

[bunkat]

You may want to clean the input next time...

[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!

[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.

[woah]

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

[FarhadG]

what other respectable platforms do you know of that offer this service?

[adsahay]

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

[bazookaBen]

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

[mehdim]

alt+up or alt+down

[jQueryIsAwesome]

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