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brummett / Devel-hdb

A graphical Perl debugger implemented as a web service
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Revise to use websocket rather than REST? #100

Closed rocky closed 9 years ago

rocky commented 9 years ago

I was looking at the V8 debugger protocol and it strikes me that for a web-based interface sockets might be the more appropriate way to go.

The problem with REST is that it is based on a the client issuing a request and getting a single response to that. But events can happen asynchronously. For example, the debugged program can crash unexpectedly. Or it can get a signal that the debugger would like to handle. Or there might be more than one response triggered from a request such as a response and a stack trace from an exception.

Comments?

brummett commented 9 years ago

The current solution is that status reports from the server (such as a response from a single-step request) include an 'events' field that's a list of all the asynchronous events that happened since the request was received (watch exprs changing, program termination, fork ,etc - every place enqueue_event() is called on the Perl side). The client goes through that list of events when it gets a response.

The code for using websockets instead would surely be cleaner, but I'm loath to rip out what's currently working unless there's a use-case it can't easily handle.

rocky commented 9 years ago

Makes sense.