Thanks for the pointer to SA Plugin - didn't know about that. Any idea how widely used it is?
Thanks for the rest of the feedback as well, /Staffan On 22 feb 2012, at 10:34, Krystal Mok wrote: > Hi Staffan, > > There's at least another frontend, the SA Plugin for Visual VM. I think it > only uses the BugSpotAgent for attaching/detaching, otherwise it doesn't use > stuff from BugSpot. > Other tools, e.g. jstack -m, jstack -F, jmap -F, etc., are not exactly SA > frontends, but use the SA to implement their functionality. > > I use CLHSDB a lot when I poke around the internals of HotSpot. It's good for > its purpose, except that history support is really weird, e.g. pressing up > arrow give "^[[A". When I need commands not available in CLHSDB yet, I can > write a JavaScript file and use "jsload" in CLHSDB to extend it with new > commands. Example here: [1]. > > I seldom use JSDB directly, because the command style of CLHSDB works better, > if the commands cover all the needs during a debugging session. When writing > new commands for CLHSDB, sometimes I use the "jseval" command to try things > out first, before actually writing them into a script file. That overlaps > with what JSDB does, but of course prototyping in JSDB would be much nicer > than in CLHSDB. > > On the top of my wishlist on CLHSDB, I'd wish for: > 1. better input support (something like jline would be great) > 2. AMD64 disassembler support (not frontend issue) > 3. live stepping/breakpointing support (not frontend issue) > > If 2 and 3 is implemented, I might be able to spend more time in CLHSDB, > where sometimes I have to use a native debugger like gdb. But these aren't > frontend issue anyway. I'd be grateful for any advise on how to debug a > product build HotSpot with gdb instead of CLHSDB, where a lot of debugging > support functions are not available in HotSpot itself and the symbols are > inconvenient to access. > > On the GUI side, Poonam did a presentation on the SA Plugin in JavaOne 2011. > The "Future Plans" part sounds interesting. I think this plugin is the most > visible way to use SA for most end users. It'd be great if it could be open > sourced and made more extensible, say, embedding a variant of CLHSDB into > this plugin. > > Regards, > Kris Mok > > [1]: https://gist.github.com/1393698 > > On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Staffan Larsen <staffan.lar...@oracle.com> > wrote: > I'm trying to figure out what the different front ends to SA are and how they > differ. So far I have identified the following: > > HSDB - basic UI > CLHSDB - command line version of HSDB > BugSpot - improvement over HSDB ?? > JSDB - JavaScript command line > SOQL - Simple Object Query Language command line > > Have I missed any? > > What are your experiences with these? Which ones are most used? Should we > maintain all of them? Can we consolidate them into one? Specifically: what is > the difference between HSDB and BugSpot? > > I'd be happy for all and any feedback, > /Staffan >
