Modern Command-Line Programming a la Bloomberg Terminal [closed]

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Closed 9 years ago.

I want build a financial analysis tool that will feature screen after screen of diverse, dynamic options. The screens will change based on the input from the previous screens. Any single screen can have hundreds of options, most of which will be listed in lists. I think creating my application using a regular gui style will be difficult and slow.

I'd like to build my software in a command-line like environment. I think the closest thing to what I'm going for is a Bloomberg terminal.

Are there any tools, toolkits, environments, etc that I can use to build my app on a totally blank slate that I can constantly change? I need to be able to draw charts and would love as much flexibility in graphics as possible. The folks at Bloomberg somehow do this. Can anyone give me some tips?

I have considered using a browser-based approach but I would much prefer something more native.

If it matters I'd most like to code in Java and/or jRuby.

Thanks!

Please note that regardless of the merits of the approach (per your view), I have a valid technical question.

Answer 1

SDL comes to mind. Although developed for games, it gives you complete control over graphics output. There's bindings for Java as well as Ruby.

Wikipedia has a good overview

Answer 2

You'll need to read up on text terminal emulation and ANSI escape codes (for drawing, cursor placement, etc.). See also this.

I would strongly suggest you consider EXEL as that is the UI of choice on Wall Street. I am also not convinced that a GUI would be (grossly) less efficient but GUIs are not the end all be all of user interfaces. If you believe a text-based virtual terminal approach is best, then go for it!

[edit: See also this open source Java emulator projects]

Answer 3

Well if you want to draw graphics you'll have to eventually pick up some basic graphics libraries to draw charts. I'd suggest using JFreeCharts because it's an API to build the charting without drawing line by line which you'll never want to do.

For console input you can use Console in Java6. That's better than using System.in, System.out.

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/io/Console.html

As for not building a GUI you could build a command line operation in Swing so that you can script it, but support more complex editing that's not possible with straight command line processing. I actually started to build a framework for building command line tools that run inside a swing window so you can get nicer editing, but I haven't open sourced it yet.

If you're adamant about not using a UI toolkit like Swing then you can use BufferedImage:

http://download.oracle.com/javase/6/docs/api/java/awt/image/BufferedImage.html

To draw any graphics you want, but you'll basically be learning Java2D, and rendering graphics pixel by pixel into a BufferedImage and save that to a file instead of the screen. I think you'll find this route very difficult to build results out of it, but you can literally render anything you want.