Affrus
Regular readers will know that Iâm learning Perl, and always on the lookout for good books, tutorials or tools to help me along. So I was quite excited to see it mentioned on TidBITS that Late Night Software have just brought out a Perl editor and debugger called Affrus. I know that many Perl aficionados maintain that you donât need an IDE for Perl, but the fact that the question is a FAQ on Perldoc.com suggests that many people still want one.
Itâs true that with use strict; and use warnings; you get a pretty good idea where your code is going wrong. Thereâs also perldebug which gives you all the debugging functions you are ever likely to want, albeit with a rather intimidating command line interface. BBEdit has excellent Perl support (including the ability to run a script and see the output, and to look up the documentation for functions in perldoc), as do vi or vim if you use the appropriate plugins. But I was curious to see what else it could offer, and downloaded the demo.
The interface is quite clean, with a single editing window for the code, with tabs at the top to open the variables, errors or debugging windows. The editor has nice syntax highlighting, but otherwise isnât quite as fully featured as BBEdit. However, the developers have thoughtfully added an âEdit in BBEditâ menu item, so that users of BBEdit get the best of both worlds. I tried writing a simple script and debugging it with Affrus, and it certainly made it easier to see where my rather stupid errors were. You can step through code, or let it run to a breakpoint, and the values of all the variables are displayed in a window for your inspection. Another nice touch is that you can save any number of different command line arguments to be passed to your script so that you can select the appropriate one from a popup menu when you run it.
ght Software are also well known for their Applescript products, and Affrus seems to be highly scriptable; so if it doesnât work in the way you want, you can probably write an Applescript to make it so (bsag does Jean-Luc Picard âpointing gestureâ). It seems a neat and well-integrated solution, but I think Iâll stick with my existing tools for the moment. It has encouraged me to learn how to use perldebug properly thoughâI might spend less time going around in circles when trying to get scripts to work.
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2004/03/18 13:38 bsag pocket-reviews Affrus
by 2lmc spool @ 18/03/2004 1:04 pm • Permalink •
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O'Reilly books are the shiz, if you're going to get one get the camel, then the nutshell.
For give the ghetto speak, the Blizzard here has some how inspired it, maybe it's all the overstuffed down jackets..----- Austin: I'm reading the camel on O'Reilly's Safari. It is--as you say--the shiz.
by bsag @ 18/03/2004 7:04 pm • Permalink •
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i am loving affrus right now. i think mark has done a great job, and it has helped me through the challenge that is debugging perl. =)
and, my perl cd bookshelf 4.0 arrived from amazon! hooray! my only complaint is that mastering regular expressions is in pdf format instead of html. i still have my paperback copy, but i like the html for portability.
by brian @ 19/03/2004 3:03 am • Permalink •
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brian: Ooo, I'm jealous! I'd love that CD bookshelf.
by bsag @ 19/03/2004 8:03 pm • Permalink •
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If you're "Learning Perl", you should at least give a quick read to my book of the same name, rather than the Camel. Sure, it may restate the obvious if you're already familar with some of the concepts, but we worked pretty hard to ensure that it lays a good foundation for further learning.
Also, check out the follow-on book when you're done with that: "Learning Perl Objects, References and Modules". Everything you need to know for 100 to 10K line programs.
by Randal L. Schwartz @ 20/03/2004 11:03 pm • Permalink •
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Randal L. Schwartz: I have!
That's the beauty of O'Reilly's Safari--you can read all the books you need. I read it before the camel book, and still refer to it now and again when I forget something important.
by bsag @ 21/03/2004 6:04 pm • Permalink •
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