Hi Staffan, There's at least another frontend, the SA Plugin for Visual VM. I think it only uses the BugSpotAgent for attaching/detaching, otherwise it doesn't use stuff from BugSpot. Other tools, e.g. jstack -m, jstack -F, jmap -F, etc., are not exactly SA frontends, but use the SA to implement their functionality.
I use CLHSDB a lot when I poke around the internals of HotSpot. It's good for its purpose, except that history support is really weird, e.g. pressing up arrow give "^[[A". When I need commands not available in CLHSDB yet, I can write a JavaScript file and use "jsload" in CLHSDB to extend it with new commands. Example here: [1]. I seldom use JSDB directly, because the command style of CLHSDB works better, if the commands cover all the needs during a debugging session. When writing new commands for CLHSDB, sometimes I use the "jseval" command to try things out first, before actually writing them into a script file. That overlaps with what JSDB does, but of course prototyping in JSDB would be much nicer than in CLHSDB. On the top of my wishlist on CLHSDB, I'd wish for: 1. better input support (something like jline would be great) 2. AMD64 disassembler support (not frontend issue) 3. live stepping/breakpointing support (not frontend issue) If 2 and 3 is implemented, I might be able to spend more time in CLHSDB, where sometimes I have to use a native debugger like gdb. But these aren't frontend issue anyway. I'd be grateful for any advise on how to debug a product build HotSpot with gdb instead of CLHSDB, where a lot of debugging support functions are not available in HotSpot itself and the symbols are inconvenient to access. On the GUI side, Poonam did a presentation on the SA Plugin in JavaOne 2011. The "Future Plans" part sounds interesting. I think this plugin is the most visible way to use SA for most end users. It'd be great if it could be open sourced and made more extensible, say, embedding a variant of CLHSDB into this plugin. Regards, Kris Mok [1]: https://gist.github.com/1393698 On Wed, Feb 22, 2012 at 4:26 PM, Staffan Larsen <staffan.lar...@oracle.com>wrote: > I'm trying to figure out what the different front ends to SA are and how > they differ. So far I have identified the following: > > HSDB - basic UI > CLHSDB - command line version of HSDB > BugSpot - improvement over HSDB ?? > JSDB - JavaScript command line > SOQL - Simple Object Query Language command line > > Have I missed any? > > What are your experiences with these? Which ones are most used? Should we > maintain all of them? Can we consolidate them into one? Specifically: what > is the difference between HSDB and BugSpot? > > I'd be happy for all and any feedback, > /Staffan
