How to install "JavaSpider" plug-in (by Eric Gamma) in the modern Eclipse environment or what to use instead of it?

Question

Question: How to install JavaSpider plug-in in the modern Eclipse? If it is deprecated, than what superseded JavaSpider?

Context: In "Contributing to Eclipse" Book by Eric Gamma and Kent Beck the JavaSpider plug-in introduced in Chapter 3.3.

The purpose of the plug-in is to show current objects tree in VM with some useful functions like change objects' fields or call their methods.

www.javaspider.org is unavailable, but I've found the plug-in here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/javaspider/

However it seems that it is not supported for years. And JavaSpider plug-in is unavailable in "Install New Software..." windows from Eclipse.

I've downloaded it from SourceForge, but it seems that sources are pretty old.

Answer 1

I'm not familiar with JavaSpider, but from your description, you might be interested in nWire for Java, which is a modern code exploration plugin for Eclipse.

Note that nWire work by using Static code analysis and not by using runtime information. If you want to inspect the runtime objects you'd better use a profiler (I like JProfiler).