Sunday, December 01 2002

I'm writing a Cocoa application for performing DNS lookups, just for the fun of it of course. And, because of my recent rants on helper programs (see here), I thought I'd write something up to see how easy (or difficult!) this would actually be.

The application will be a front-end to the tools dnsqr and dnsq from djbdns. These tools handle all sorts of DNS queries, but I'll start with simple address and pointer lookups just to get a basic design in place.

I thought about a minimal user interface to get started: a text field where you enter the name or address to lookup, and a table view (or something similar) where the results are displayed. I then thought a bit about how I use the these tools from the command line and came to the conclusion that this minimal interface wasn't enough. Using the application instead of using the tools directly would give few benefits.

I have to come up with an interface that makes it easy to specify a range of lookups to be performed. What about the user interface in Blizzard's original game WarCraft? It takes very few key strokes to order the construction of a farm. Can something similar be done in a DNS query app? How about serializing commands? The user could construct a command chain or tree where consecutive commands use the output of the former as input?

I'll have to give this some more thought. But first, back to that minimal interface.