Forum OpenACS Q&A: Anybody using TclPro?

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Posted by Edmund Lian on
I've not heard anybody mention using TclPro for debugging. Any
comments about its usefulness?
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Posted by Michael A. Cleverly on
According to http://dev.scriptics.com/customers/success/AOLcase.html the folks at AOL use TclPro.
Another factor contributing to the efficiency and performance of Davidson's team has been TclPro. One of the most difficult aspects of training new developers, Davidson found, was educating them in debugging methods to ensure the accuracy and performance of new code.

"Until we got TclPro, I had really no good way of training these developers about what it means to debug, and how to use tools to track and eliminate problems in their code."

After making TclPro part of the platform at Digital City, Davidson quickly realized significant cost savings. According to a senior member of his staff, Digital City's developers spend approximately half their time debugging code. Since the installation of TclPro, this ratio has dropped precipitously. "Things that would take someone an hour in the past take 20 minutes or so now," said Davidson. Multiplied over Davidson's 20-person developer team, the time and cost benefits are quite substantial.

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Posted by Abha B. on
Where does one get this TclPro? I have never used it before...but, would like to check it out?
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Posted by carl garland on
Just curious .... Is anyone using TclPro in the openacs / aolserver community? I installed and played with it and saw where it could be
useful but it appeared to me that you while debugging / stepping through code you had to continually reprofile? the procedures that you wanted to step through each and every time / page. It would be really
nice if you were able to have tclpro examine all procs and keep them for session at least. It seemed to me quicker to just revert to either
ns_puts or ns_log msgs.  Anyone else have thoughts?
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Posted by Don Baccus on
If someone has a cookbook approach to using TclPro and OpenACS together, let's get it written up and put into the OpenACS docs.  It's  open source now so there should be a lot more interest in it.
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Posted by Jerry Asher on
My experience with TclPro and the ACS (about a weekend's worth of experience) is similar to Carl's.

I couldn't get it to keep my breakpoints between invocations, and so in the end, I have reverted to ns_log style debugging.

Currently, my development environment consists of Emacs with an nscp window for tcl testing, a pl/sql window for sql testing, and David Lutterkort's extensions to emacs to prettify/color code server logs and help one copy queries from the log into your SQL buffer (binding variables along the way and with realtime tailing of the server log.)

Throw in a dose of ACS 4 developer support (to easily track headers, cookies, and timing of queries) when I can, and my nsvhr patches to AOLserver (which can be used to get HEX/ASCII dumps of everything in or out of your system), and what do you got?

A very sophisticated world of printf debugging.

Sigh,