While developing agents for The Marionette Collective it’s often quite difficult to debug weird behavior in agents, I wrote a debugger that makes development easier.
Agents tend to run in a thread inside a daemon connected through middleware, this all makes it really hard. The debugger is a harness that runs an agent standalone allowing you to trace calls, set breakpoints and all the other goodies you expect in a good debugger.
To use it you need to grab the source from GitHub and also install the ruby-debug Gem.
Since I am using the normal ruby-debug debugger for the hard work you can read any of the many tutorials and screencasts about its use and apply what you lean in this environment, the screencast below shows you a quick tour through the features and usage. The screencast is high quality so feel free to full-screen it.
As the screencast mention there’s still some tweaking to do so that the ruby-debug will notice code changes without restarting and I might tweak the trace option a bit. Already though this is a huge improvement for anyone writing an Agent.
