[Glass] Object Explorer for GemStone - looking for early users

[Dale Henrichs via Glass]

Recently I have started work expanding upon the initial efforts of 
Pierre Chanson and his PointerDetective for GemStone video[2] that he 
shared with us last summer ..

The work is in it's early stages, but it is in good enough shape for 
interested folks to start playing with[1].

The Object Explorer is implemented in tODE and leverages Roassal2 for 
visualizations (see the ReadMe for examples[1]). The point of the tool 
is to allow developers to understand why their image is so large and to 
help track down object leaks ...

Rather than try to put together a complete toolset and then release it 
to unsuspecting users, I would like to get feedback very early in the 
process ... there are lots of options for both collecting data and 
visualizing the results and I would like early feedback from developers 
who have real problems ...

Right now the tool scans a backup using James' ScanBackup package ... I 
have expanded the ScanBackup code to collect instances of the classes 
being scanned and then use a collection of instances to build an 
instance count based on _references_ to objects in a collection ...

The results are then displayed in a Roassal2 visualization ... menu 
items in the window allow you to inspect objects and then launch 
additional visualizations from the inspector ...

This work is only a couple of days old and will be undergoing 
significant work moving forward, but if any of you are currently 
struggling with object leaks and the like, you might benefit from using 
the tool as is and if you did, you'd be able to provide us with valuable 
feedback ...

If anyone is interested in playing with the object explorer let me know 
and I will provide installation instructions ...

Lawrence, if you are listening, I'm sure that you'll be happy to hear 
that I have blown the dust off of your very large extent and will be 
using it as one of my test cases for tracking down object leaks ...

Dale

[1] https://github.com/dalehenrich/obex#object-explorer-for-gemstones-64
[2] https://vimeo.com/131145038
[3] http://seaside.gemtalksystems.com/ss/ScanBackup.html