use Perl

http://svn.ali.as/cpan/releases/Aspect-Library-Trace-0.02.tar.gz

When I first discovered Devel::DProf I fell in love with it not once, but twice.

First and foremost there was the profiling functionality that I've since replaced with the far superior and not-bit-rotted Devel::NYTProf.

But the second really useful feature was the C command, which took the function call tree and printed it out. This made for a really easy way to debug a programs internals, because you could filter the (gigantic) function tree output and see when and where various interesting functions were called.

Aspect::Library::Trace is partial replacement for this functionality.

It replaces a debugger-level internals hooking of all function calls with an Aspect-controllable selective hook (Aspect implements "Aspect Oriented Programming" concepts, which at it's core is a fancy structured wrapper for Hook::LexWrap.

To use it, you just do something like the following in your top level script (after you have loaded the modules you care about).

    use Aspect;
    use Aspect::Library::Trace;

    aspect Trace => call qr/^Foo::/;

A function tree of all modules described in the pointcut (that would be the qr/^Foo::/ bit) will be printed to STDERR.

    Foo::foo1
        Foo::foo2
            Foo::foo3
    Foo::foo2
        Foo::foo3
    Foo::foo2
        Foo::foo3

I've been finding this particularly useful for debugging things like where different DBI code gets called from, and whether or not caching code is working the way I expect it to.

Update:

After finding it too hard to type three lines, I've also added support for a simple one-line form.

use Aspect::Library::Trace qr/^Foo::/;