Re: Cross-platform GUI for UNIX based scripts

[LanX]

Depends... Tk (or a web-app) are the usual suspect...

... but if I understand your requirements right, you should consider using curses to have quick and efficient results.

It's a TUI¹ not a GUI, which should be sufficient for you. (see Curses::UI)

Like this you only need a terminal emulation on Win or Mac.

And you can reconnect to long running sessions thru Putty and even automate the connection.

Just spares yourself of the headaches of ...

• portability and
• access control,
• HTML templates,
• Ajax protocol
• synchronizing client and server updates
• user complaining about ugly Tk design...

my 2¢...

¹) Text User Interface which approaches the features of a GUI

[Anonymous Monk]

Hm might be the easiest way, thanks. People really love fancy GUIs though and few share my love to command lines.

[LanX]

> People really love fancy GUIs though and few share my love to command lines.

You didn't give us much information about the context.

TUIs are semantically not much different from GUIs, it's just the optics and Tk is nowadays far from common taste, especially when confronted with Win/Mac folks.

Anyway the other client/server approaches will produce overhead, if you need to duplicate features which are already provided by ssh/putty.

For instance "user authentication":

• Does security matter?

• Who's allowed to use/connect to your web-app?

• Who's account is used to start your process?

• Who is in charge for necessary port forwardings?

• and so on ...

Maybe your use case is plain vanilla and security doesn't matter!

But better be sure of the features needed when replacing ssh/putty as a tool and the amount of time you are able to invest.

I've seen too many badly maintained GUI's/ web-apps because the amount of work to keep everything up to date was underestimated.

[Anonymous Monk]

Seems like I was underestimating the work required for such solution.. The application is for a company (not familiar with putty/UNIX) but will also be available to public (most users very tech savvy). I think I will stick with the simpler solutions, thanks.