Remote Development/Debugging
Last updated at 12:55 am UTC on 17 January 2006
by Jon Hylands
In order to facilitate working on Squeak in my Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Error: this should not happen, I want to start working on a simple framework that will allow, in the beginning, a remote workspace, but eventually has full browser and debugger support over a socket connection.
I am soliciting input from the community on this project. I don't promise to do all or even any of what other people want, but I am interested in what people think and what they want.
I want to architect this right from the beginning, so that when the time comes to add remote debugger support, I won't have to throw everything away and start over.
- First, is there already a project like this underway? I didn't find anything useful on the Swiki looking for "remote debugging"...
- Second, what features would you like to see?
- Third, what communication framework should I use? I'm currently thinking about using a SmartRefStream. I know it would facilitate inter-Smalltalk work on this if I used something like SOAP Opera or SIXX...
Please add comments as you see fit...
Jon Hylands (jon@huv.com)
- dgd: Consider to use rST - Remote Smalltalk, It work over a tcp network but (I guess) it's relatively easy to add serial support.
(Jon - Looks good, but if I use Flow this probably won't do me much good...)
(dgd: Flow and rST are different type of animals. rST is a framework to send messages to objects located in diferent images (probably over the net), to interact with images located where you want in a transparent way (for example: rST has a distributed GC). Flow, iirc, is a stream/communication layer. rST can be changed to use Flow as a communication mechanism )
- Does Nebraska have any useful functionality for you?
(Jon - I think Nebraska has far too much overhead for what I want. As well, I need a solution that isn't bound to Morphic...)
- Luciano Notarfrancesco: I would use Flow for the communications. It's very clean, and you'll get support for both tcp sockets and serial ports with no extra work.
(Jon - that sounds like a good idea...)