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Hi,

What i really, really want is an Eclipse plugin (or built-in facility i
haven't come across) for browsing the heap when debugging. At the moment,
all i have is the Variables view, which is nice if you're just looking at
what's happening in the local frame, but gets a bit gnarly if you want to
wander out into the heap, which i quite often do: you can twist the
triangles to see objects' fields, and so chase pointers to wherever, but
right now i'm looking at a field 19 layers down (partly due to a DOM
implementation which uses a linked list for children - i'm actually
drilling down to and then through an XML document), Eclipse is not super
happy about it, and it was an Indiana Jones-style struggle getting there
in the first place.

What i'd love is something that draws boxes and arrows, starting with a
box for 'this' (or the current stack frame) in the middle, with arrows
radiating out to the immediately pointed-to-objects, and where clicking on
one of those object would make that one expand into a rosette of
referents, etc. Plus labels on the boxes showing the class and ID, labels
on the arrows showing the field name, some way to collapse objects,
re-centre the view, rearrange the objects, and hide irrelevant pointers,
and smart handling of things like standard collections, so a Map appears
as a grid of keys and values, rather than the actual flotilla of objects
that makes it up (unless i want to see them).

Does anyone know anything like that?

The closest thing i know is the wonderful and fairly obscure Heap Analysis
Tool:

http://java.sun.com/javase/6/docs/te...hare/jhat.html

Which isn't graphical.

I also want an XML DOM browser plugin, so during debugging i can point at
a variable that contains an object which implements org.w3c.dom.Node (or,
ideally, a corresponding DOM4J etc interface) and say "show me the
structure of this document", and in return get a display that looks like

html
head
title "Gnarly Debugg0r Paeg"
body
div id="report"
initechSpecialSection
reportType "TPS"

etc. Anyone know of something like that?

Lastly, i want a plugin where i can point to a class, probably written by
someone else, and for which i may not have source or even javadoc, and say
"draw me a class diagram, like in UML or something, for this class and its
closest dependents". I'm certain these exist - can anyone recommend a
particular one?

tom

--
Gens una summus.