What is best way to debug Shoes applications?

Question

Shoes has some built in dump commands (Shoes.debug), but are there other tools that can debug the code without injecting debug messages throughout? Something like gdb would be great.

Answer 1

Have you looked at the ruby-debug gem?

% sudo gem install ruby-debug

The rdebug executable gives you a similar interface to gdb (breakpoint setting, etc). You just simply execute your script with rdebug instead of ruby.

You can also do something like this to avoid manually setting breakpoints:

class Foo
  require 'ruby-debug'
  def some_method_somewhere
    debugger # acts like a breakpoint is set at this point
  end
end

Here's a tutorial on ruby-debug: http://www.datanoise.com/articles/2006/7/12/tutorial-on-ruby-debug

Answer 2

The shoes console. Press Alt+/ (or apple+/ on a mac) to see the stack trace of your application.

Answer 3

You can also use Shoes.show_log to automatically open a debug console.

Answer 4

Note that if you use Alt + / you'll have to run that "before" starting the app

Answer 5

I was a bit confused about the Apple-/ (or Alt-/) bit mentioned here. What I ended up doing was running ./shoes with no arguments, which popped up the console, then started my app with *./shoes my_app.rb*.