Forum OpenACS Q&A: Tclpro for debugging

Collapse
Posted by Jun Yamog on
Has anybody used Tclpro on developing with Aolserver?  OpenACS is
built on Aolserver anyway.

http://tcl.activestate.com/software/tclpro/

According to the docs is can debug Tcl code in Tcl interpreters that
is embedded on application.  So I guess it could work on Aolserver.
Although aolserver has made modification to the Tcl so its thread safe.

I have gotten away developing ACS sites by its out of the box error
code that is displayed on the page.  But maybe more complex stuff you
may need a real debugger rather than using the browser or "ns_log notice".

Anybody has comments about Tclpro?  Do you use debuggers?  If yes then
what do you use?

I guess it would be great if we can create a FAQ that gives out good
practices in developing in OpenACS.  You know use CVS, naming
conventions, etc.  Arsdigita has publish some sorts of this in their
engineering practices doc.

Collapse
Posted by Don Baccus on
Supposedly TclPro can be made to work, but I've not done so myself.  It used to be proprietary so I think a bunch of us just learned to muddle on without a debugger.  It's free, now, though so it's more interesting, right?

If you get information from folks on how to get it working, it would be great to have a little FAQ section on how to do so.  And if such a document exists at aD or elsewhere, it would be great to have a pointer to it.

Collapse
Posted by David Cohen on
I know a company doing non-ACS AOLserver/Tcl stuff who told me they've used it and people at aD have used it too--you might want to post a msg on the web/db forum at arsdigita.com.
Collapse
Posted by Roberto Mello on
I had this on the back of my mind for some time now, so I just decided to do it. It was quite easy to get TclPro working with AOLserver actually, and I was very pleased. I don't know if this works for plain .tcl files thought.

This is going to save me lots of "ns_log notice" 😊 The documentation on how to make AOLserver work with TclPro is here: http://aolserver.com:80/docs/tcldev/tadp-ch6.htm#23673

And here's a screenshot: http://www.brasileiro.net/openacs/adp-debug.jpg.

Collapse
Posted by carl garland on
I set up TCLPro a while back and while it is easy to do it seemed to me that as you were stepping thru the code in a debugging session you had to repeatably analyze the procedures you were going into for each page hit and it doesnt cache the code. This seemed to take more time than actually using ns_log. Has anyone found a way to change this behavior?