Nikita SavchenkoNikitaSavchenkoeverywhere

WebTerminal: My Biggest Open Source Project

Jul 8, 2014#tech
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The features of WebTerminalCommand execution and autocomplete demonstration

My first and most powerful project at InterSystems. This is a native Caché DBMS terminal emulator as a web application with full VT100 escape sequence support, syntax highlighting, an intelligent suggestion mechanism (autocomplete), and many other features.

History

During the summer internship in 2013, I was working on the first version of the WebTerminal project. This was an experimental project whose goal was to build a WebSockets application and demonstrate how it works. But the project grew, and many corporate members started to use it.

As of today, WebTerminal is used all around the world by more than 100 corporate employees and partners. WebTerminal was integrated into different projects like InterSystems IDEL (online learning platform) and Atom IDE plugin for Caché development, which enable hundreds, if not thousands of people to work with InterSystems technology more efficiently.

The WebTerminal project was almost completely rewritten twice: once in 2013, at the very beginning of the project lifecycle, and once in 2016. The 2016 update solved some major problems with previous versions and brought support for intelligent syntax highlighting and a new on-the-fly suggestion mechanism, as well as project architecture improvements.

Links

  1. Community feedback about WebTerminal
  2. Official project page
  3. GitHub repository
  4. Old demo of a very first version of WebTerminal
  5. The publication about the WebTerminal project in the USA
  6. My article on the project on habrahabr.ru (russian)
  7. Mentions about WebTerminal on InterSystems Global Summit 2017