I currently split my time between VDF and Ruby on Rails, and it's shocking how productive the RoR console tools make you.

To this end, I thought it'd be good to create a proof of concept VDF based console tool. Firstly to see if it can be done, and secondly to help me easily :
- create new applications
- create new tables and changes to tables
- add and download libraries (much the same as nuget and gem)

BTW. Later Versions of Microsoft Visual Studio also have these kinds of tools (e.g. NuGet.) Console tools are definitely something that people use and like.

Because there's no "Console Mode" for Visual Dataflex (And I'm not exactly sure why not), It's been a bit of a hack. (The command line commands are actually defined as JSON WebApp Services) But I have something working. I'm calling it "bits"

Here it is in action:
http://www.screenr.com/aEZ8

At the moment, you can only list a filelist from a certain folder. I'll add functionality as it's needed.

I plan on adding the following items:
- Adding new files and changing existing files (migrations)
- Automatically downloading and installing libraries
- Quick Creation of views and web views based on named fields (scaffolding).
- Command line compiling and sorting
- Registration of web applications.

The API for the tools is completely open too, so it should be easy for anyone to add whatever dataflex related processes they need to this.
e.g. A tool to backup / restore the current database, A LESS CSS Compiler, etc.

My question is, Is this something people could see themselves using?

If so, I plan on funding it through something like Kickstarter. The aim is to open source it eventually, but I think that if it's done properly, it could really add value for those of us that use dataflex. I know these kind of projects have been tried before to limited success, but would you actually pay for this to be developed? Would it be something you'd contribute say $500.00 towards?

If you're Data Access, would you also contribute to make this happen?
Anyway - Thought I'd throw that out there. This all feels a bit sales-pitchy, so I'm probably breaking some forum rules.

But - please, tell me what you think. Good idea? Bad idea? Worthless idea?