The Return of the Command Line

There’s an enormous amount to consider, and the slightest whiff of marketing-speak, in Jim Moore‘s
Fifteen reasons why DIY Web Superservices will transform the landscape
.

But there’s one point in there that was an aha! moment for me:

We are experiencing the return of the command line in computing.  The URL has become a the command line for open superservices.

The classic Google interface, for example, is now seen by web superservices hackers as a command line generator.  The Google interface is code generator.

Here is an example:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=geocode&btnG=Google+Search

This command causes the Google machinery to perform a search and render the results in a particular manner.

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2 Responses to The Return of the Command Line

  1. Michael says:

    Actually, this isn’t really the “return” of anything. These url strings have been there all along, and this stuff has been exposed to the user the whole time. There’s a highly productive kind of hacking that involves manipulating these exposed urls into revealing information about the system behind them.
    And yes, you could think of them as analogous to the command line, but in general their creators don’t want you to think of them that way unless they expose a well-groomed and highly controlled API for your use.

  2. michael says:

    Oh, true, true. What I understood the piece to be saying is that there would be much more of it and it wouldn’t be a ‘hack’ any more, but something more commonly welcomed and used. In fact, i suspect that many people will still use GUI interfaces to get the strings…

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