You can certainly debug Jess under any Java debugger, but obviously you're going to be debugging at a low level. Our friend Alan Moore was workign on a Jess debugger at one point; not sure what happened to that project, Alan?
[alan] I have written several versions of this. The coolest one was fully integrated into COM. Jess could talk to COM objects and/or java objects. As part of this, I embedded jess in a wrapper that made it a COM ActiveScripting Engine. As such, one of the things you could do was to write HTML pages with <script language="jess"> and have rules pattern match against page/control/html events and manipulate the page just like javascript/vbscript can. The best part was being able to use VisualStudio to step, at the source level, directly from a javascript function into a jess deffunction() and down into a C++ COM object called by jess, step through jess RHS code, etc. etc. But alas, we all know what happened to the MS JVM which this code depends on (can you say .NET?) Another version was a JSP-like engine with jess glued to a template processing language called freemarker. It dynamically interpreted jess code embedded in freemarker templates and you could use freemarker syntax to iterate over jess data elements, call jess deffunctions, etc. It still works but I've found burying jess one layer down in java code just about as easy. Of course, there is the user contrib jess tag library. I've investigated a number of alternatives based on JSP and have some prototypes but nothing ready for prime time. The JSP spec handwaves about allowing other scripting languages to be embedded into a jsp page but Sun has yet to do anything real about it. A funny thing tho, take a look at the Rule Engine API JSR. Replace all instances of the word Rule with the word Script and you have the makings of a crude scripting API - w/o the debugging support. Even the BSF comes woefully short of a decent scripting API that also allows debugging such as walking virtual stack frames in a cross language way plus other necessary debugging facilities. I think the real solution will somehow be based on parsers/code generator pipelines that eventually boil down to generating or modifying .class files and/or .NET assemblies. Take a look at AspectJ, JSP, intentional programming, and the like. But that is another story and, in some ways, orthogonal to jess. Jess 7 is going to be the "Enterprise Edition," and it is slated to include an IDE with a rule editor, debugger, etc. [alan] That would be really great! Hiring any engineers for the project? <shameless solicitation> -------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, send the words 'unsubscribe jess-users [EMAIL PROTECTED]' in the BODY of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED], NOT to the list (use your own address!) List problems? Notify [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------
