Ignite CLI as Your Home Away From Home

When I first started learning snippets of programming and the basics of application building, I found myself enmeshed in a world where instructional texts supremely reigned and adjectives cowered in the corners of the room, shunned and useless. Of course, I frequently struggled when learning, as I felt that I had little to visualize in my head outside of the camel-cased text and a staccato cursor. As we cut to more recently, I've been carving a quaint path through the vast, ever-changing undergrowth of technical and technology-based writing and still yearning from time to time for story-book imaginings. With significant changes rolling through our product lines, I've found myself flitting in and out of documentation, learning, hopefully, the ins-and-outs of our updates and overall vision. So, while sitting down and listening to our manager of product development in web tools, Konstantin Dinev, I was delighted to hear him describe the update to the Ignite UI CLI, as it thoroughly encompassed a visual that was easy to understand: a house.

Ignite UI CLI as Your Home Away from Home (and Likely a lot Neater)

To establish grounds, Ignite UI for the Command-Line Interface is functioning as the framework for your newly renovated home. At this point, it's likely that you've been looking to move for some time, or you're looking to update from an older model. Its impetus is to help you build with ease by bringing along the building materials and necessary tools. Quite literally, Ignite UI CLI is a tool used to quickly automate application-building, to construct the framework within which you'll be working, to generate industry-standard scaffolding within your new application, and to allow the swift addition of modules and components into your freshly conceived program.

So, let's dive into the framework and parse out some highlights:

• Since there isn't large-scale instrumentation to use the framework to collect extensive data, the framework still ships at a smaller size and allows for speedier performance.
• Its build directly targets web developers, particularly those who may be unfamiliar with or don’t tend to use Visual Studio. It enables a familiar environment and mimics a command-line version of VS's Toolbox.
• The command-line interface is truly cross-platform, as any machine will use Bash or Shell scripting with operating system specific coding being left to the developer's specific project goals.
• It is built on Node.js for cross-platform appeal, as Node.js is lightweight and the npm package manager is the largest amongst open-source libraries.
• It installs all of the necessary dependencies to make your projects run, which is particularly helpful to those just starting out (and unsure of what dependencies might even be needed).

At first, glances, Ignite UI CLI is extremely helpful. Since it supports jQuery, Angular, and React, you can pull components from both Ignite UI for Angular and Ignite UI for JavaScript to save time on project-building. So, if you wanted to add a grid, chart, or carousel for data viewing, you’d have the ability to do so in seconds. On top of various views, you can also access different templates that can be adjusted to your specific scenario, essentially putting together multiple components to create a comprehensive dashboard.

As you can see, this tool is offering ease and compatibility to the bug-hardened developer, to the fresh-faced junior developer, and everyone in between. From mentioning before, it’s best to understand Ignite UI for CLI as a sturdy home. It provides structure, one with familiar and navigable elements that are inherent to its design. As I move through this series on the CLI features, I'll be showing you a variety of ways that you can make the CLI wizard work for you and best practices for beginning to set up your new home.

If you'd like to get a start on using Ignite UI for CLI, please take a look at the GitHub page and try it out with samples from our wiki. It's by far one of the quickest command line tools that you'll have encountered.