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acme (189)

acme
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http://www.astray.com/
Leon Brocard (aka acme) is an orange-loving Perl eurohacker with many varied contributions to the Perl community, including the GraphViz module on the CPAN. YAPC::Europe was all his fault. He is still looking for a Perl Monger group he can start which begins with the letter 'D'.

Journal of acme (189)

Wednesday April 20, 2005
06:16 AM

Benedict

[ #24292 ]
"Benedict" is the code name for Devel::ebug 0.41. No, I don't mean Benedict XVI, I mean Eggs Benedict, a curiously American dish, which I prepared this morning with pastel-coloured Old Cotswold Legbars eggs. Mmmmmmm.

Anyway, I bet you're wondering what is in the release. Well, the full changelog is below (release engineering, sigh). It's been more of a plodding-along-release, with a few neat features. There's still lots of bugs to fix (as clkao keeps on finding them!) but the neatest feature is tooltips for all the variables. It's easiest to explain after you've seen the movie.

So as you see, the neat thing is that if you hover the mouse over a variable, you get to see a little tooltip containing its value (as represented by YAML). What this actually does is a asynchronous JavaScript call to the server, parses the XML it returns and presents a tooltip. Behold the power of AJAX, provided by Prototype and overlib. Of course, what makes this all possible is that we now use Catalyst. That's quite enough exciting project names for now. I need to go for a little lie down...

     - remove "work around" as it is fixed in Catalyst 5.03
     - fix small HTML bug (spotted by LTjake)
     - new xmlns + language declarations (thanks to LTjake)
     - minor tweak to generate valid HTML
     - whoops, we were depending on Catalyst 4 to still be around
     - "work around" Catalyst bug with external hostnames
     - updated prereqs
     - update docs for ebug_http
     - major refactoring of ebug_http to now use Catalyst 5.0
     - we now capture STDOUT, STDERR - their contents are available
       using the new output method
     - ebug now shows STDOUT, STDERR
     - ebug_http now shows STDOUT, STDERR
     - no longer stop processing as the program exits
     - tab completion of variables in ebug (x $var), as suggested by
       Autrijus
     - in ebug_http, new dynamic tooltips to show the value of
       variables on the current line, using prototype and overlib
     - "return" not in a subroutine is now the same as "run" instead
       of giving an error (spotted by clkao)
     - documented that ebug and ebug_http can run programs with
       arguments by quoting them (spotted by clkao)
     - minor output patch for ebug.t
     - tweaked the test to skip Test::Expect under Windows
     - new yaml method to return the YAML representation of a variable
     - improved undo tests
     - better use of PPI (spotted by Alias)
     - install the templates / JavaScript / CSS / images to sitelib


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Benedict 8 Comments More | Login | Reply /

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  • Can't seem to download it :-\
    • What error do you get?
      • Access Denied.
        • Must be a local problem (errr, use.perl.org screwing up the first line):

          kanga:~% HEAD <a href="http://www.astray.com/tmp/ebug2.mov">http://www.astray.com/tmp/ebug2.mov</ a>
          200 OK
          Connection: close
          Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:21:08 GMT
          Accept-Ranges: bytes
          ETag: "104d3-1904b2-4266366e"
          Server: Apache/1.3.27 (Unix) PHP/4.3.3 mod_perl/1.27
          Content-Length: 1639602
          Content-Type: video/quicktime
          Last-Modified: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 11:01:02 GMT
          Client-Date: Wed, 20 Apr 2005 14:21:08 GMT
          Client-Peer: 195.82.114.49:

  • It would be easier to read if you didn't use a big em-dash in front of the variables. They look too much like minus signs.
    • I guess that's YAML at work, but yes I agree it looks an awful lot like a minus sign to me too. Perhaps scalars should only be YAMLd if they're refs.
      • I used YAML as I didn't want to reinvent a data structure to text/HTML module. But yes, dropping the -- on scalars sounds sensible. It's now in the TODO ;-)
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