From: Harry Ohlsen <harryo@...>
Date: 2003-10-03T13:10:43+09:00
Subject: Re: RubyJWDP was Re: FreeRide

Richard Kilmer wrote:

> You will be able to script the debugging of Java programs.  You can do 
> stuff like freeze the JVM, set breakpoints, walk variable values, set 
> them, resume the vm, etc...all from Ruby.

Sounds pretty cool.  I could see this being very handy for doing stress testing and for helping to track down horrible timing bugs.

> As an interesting test I froze all threads running on 60 JVMs (across 60 
> servers) in a multiagent system.  It froze all 60 in under a second.  I 
> then resumed all threads 10 minutes later and the system just went along 
> not knowing it had "lost time" so to speak.

Cute.

> Chad Fowler and I working on this...he is working on the higher level 
> API...I just implemented the low-level wire protocol.  Its interesting 
> because I actually wrote a set of classes to be able to describe the 
> protocol (packets, data types, etc) then wrote a generator that uses 
> those metadata objects to generate the ruby implementation (complete 
> with rdoc!).  The result is a 500 line generator (which is kinda hairy 
> code) that generates the low level packets which is over 5000 lines of 
> code.

Another chapter for "Code Generation in Action" :-).

It also sounds like another good way to ease Java people into playing with Ruby.

I look forward to seeing the first release.

H.