SA frontends

[Staffan Larsen]

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.larsen at 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
> 

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