CGI Debugger issues

mykbaker wrote on Tue Apr 25 05:24:18 MEST 2006:

First I'd like to say excellent work on EPIC! The Open Source world needs
a Perl IDE.

I've been trying to get EPIC working for a few days now. I have the newest
stable build from Eclipse, and I've loaded the EPIC testing module. I'm
running on a SUSE VMWare virtual machine. Everything seems to work correctly,
except when I am working in a known good cgi file we have had in production
for a while, I get hanging at each debugging step when retrieving variables.
It will eventually work correctly, but it is just slow getting the variables
back. The code uses a lot of complex hashes, so I can understand how it
might have some delay, but I was hoping there was a way to turn off some
of the variable checking, or maybe only check variables I have set in a
watch state?

jploski wrote on Tue Apr 25 08:20:03 MEST 2006:

There is currently no way to filter debugged variables.

EPIC interfaces with the the built-in Perl debugger, which is where the
problem begins. When asked for a variable, perl -d will always output its
whole content. I don't think there is an option to truncate it. Therefore,
a simple script with a several hundred KB long string will case a major
slowdown, and if you increase this to several MBs, Eclipse will hang or
crash.

mykbaker wrote on Tue Apr 25 16:07:55 MEST 2006:

This makes sense, however, wouldn't it be possible to tell EPIC not to go
out and get every variable each time the debugger moves forward a step?
If there was some logic in there that would only go get a variable's value
if it was clicked it could solve a lot of those problems I think.

squiker wrote on Thu Apr 27 08:21:21 MEST 2006:

Perhaps a DDD like debugging interface could work?

Of course you could always call DDD from eclipses external tools feature.


By the way DDD is a debuger for multiple programming languages including
perl. It has a graphical shell and is opensource and free ware.