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Batchboard: Unix Interaction for Everyone
Michael Smith, Computer Science
Faculty Mentor: John David N. Dionisio, PhD, Assistant Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science
Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles
Project Questions
Background
Similar Programs
Enter Batchboard
Batchboard Implementation
Batchboard Status Quo
The Unix operating system, along with its
associated set of applications, tools, and utilities,
is one of the most mature software packages in
use today. In its many incarnations both past
and present, Unix enjoys wide use in universities,
businesses, and networks.
A computer’s operating system is the suite of
software services, utilities, and applications that
performs its fundamental activities. Microsoft
Windows is the best known and most widely
used operating system, but it is by no means the
most stable nor most mature one. This
distinction belongs to Unix, an operating system
that was initially developed in the 1960s and has
been continuously refined and improved since
that time.
The challenge of making Unix philosophy
“friendlier” has caught the interest of many
scientists and has produced a wide variety of
projects over the years.
Batchboard adds a new element to the category
of visual Unix interfaces: it seeks to represent
available Unix tools in a database. The database
is then read by a graphical user interface package
that generates a display based on the properties
stored in the database.
It turned out that Automator serves as a very
viable platform for the Batchboard front end.
This front end is implemented as an Automator
Action, and can be built within the Automator
environment. In addition, integration with
Automator has the potential of allowing
Batchboard to interact with the other non-Unix
actions available in Automator, further
expanding its usefulness.
Design and conceptualization of Batchboard has
been completed, and an implementation is in its
very early stages. The software is hosted on
SourceForge at:
However, Unix is virtually unknown in personal
computing. Even in the cases of Linux and Mac
OS X, both genuine Unix platforms that have
less technical or advanced users, Unix is a
background or foundation technology, neither
seen nor heard, responsible primarily for a
computer’s internal housekeeping and
management but not for direct interactive use.
Thus, Unix programs exist below the radar of
most users, despite their potential usefulness and
relative maturity in an age when newer software
can be unreliable and error-prone. Because their
stream-oriented, modular paradigm does not fit
the current window-menu-pointer conventions
of personal computers, the general population
never experiences these programs’ reliability,
stability, maturity, flexibility, and power.
Is this technical divide unavoidable? Is it
possible to design an interaction model that
enables average personal computer users to see,
explore, and utilize traditional Unix programs?
The Batchboard project seeks to answer that
question.
Unix is distinctive for many reasons beyond its
maturity and stability. A broad spectrum of
programs whose functions greatly exceed the
core tasks of an operating system exists for
Unix. In addition, these programs share a
common paradigm that allows them to work
together extremely well, without a priori
knowledge of each other’s functionality. One
can generally assume that a Unix application will
interoperate with other applications. If it does
not, then such a program is said to violate Unix
conventions.
Eric S. Raymond, one of the key proponents of
the open source software movement, analyzes
Unix’s design philosophy and culture in his book
The Art of Unix Programming. Raymond
concludes that Unix software, on both
philosophical and technical levels, stands as the
most effective, flexible, and reliable software
model to date.
Despite such qualities, this “bedrock of
unchanging basics,” in Raymond’s words,
remains unappreciated and underutilized by
today’s typical computer user. One of its key
strengths — its emphasis on providing
“mechanism, not policy” — also results in its
relative inaccessibility to non-technical users.
Squish, by Henry et. al., proposed to convert the
text-based Unix shell — the traditional method
for invoking Unix functions — into a graphical
metaphor. Borg built upon Squish with IShell,
which added a visual scripting environment,
IScript, for specifying chains of commands to be
executed in sequence. Subsequently, VUFC
(visual Unix-filter components) by Spinellis deemphasized an interactive graphical shell and
focused on a visual programming environment.
While these projects all propose a visual
interface to Unix components, they are intended
for programmers, not end users. Other projects
do target the end user, although they emphasize
different tools from the Unix software base.
The MediaPipe project focuses only on videooriented utilities. Apple’s Automator is more
general, but is focused less on Unix and more on
the scriptable functions in Mac Internet and
“digital lifestyle” products. Finally, Shellac adds
selected Unix tools to Automator. However, it
requires custom programming for each
individual Unix tool.
The database is initially built by the Batchboard
Author program. For now, it is created manually,
but a future element of Batchboard is an
automated element that can scan the programs
on a computer, look up their instructions (called
“man pages” in Unix terms), then build the
database on its own.
The end-user Batchboard Action client then reads
this database and allows the user to choose
which Unix programs to invoke. The
Batchboard Action also allows the user to
connect these programs together, so that they
work like Unix “pipes” on a text-based shell.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/batchboard
Batchboard
Author
reads
commands
from
Batchboard
Action
stores
commands
selects
command
Batchboard
Database
pipes to
Available
Commands
References
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