Agent Smith: omg! it is useless!!
Ok, I must admit it, I can’t hide: I was wrong. I’ve just discovered that Agent Smith features are already available. To everyone.
A brief explanation.
I’m an Eclipse user. I have been (silly) used in reloading my webapp every time I changed a Struts action or a piece of an Echo2 application.
I wanted to find a way to avoid reloading my webapp.
I saw Groovy. But it didn’t work with Echo2, because of the API.
I saw the Instrumentation interface and I thought: “Hey I will do that: Grovvy won’t be necessary”.
So Agent Smith saw the light. And it was just reaching version 1.0 when I was told that, actually, Eclipse has already a feature like Smith. And it’s really simple to activate it.
So, Smith is dead. Long live to Smith. Thanks to Adrians at the Echo2 forums for finally pointing that out.
I’m very sad, you know. I’ve wasted some days. The most disappointing aspect is that it took two weeks of marketing for someone to come out and say “Hey, you are wrong”.
But!
I know I’m not the only one with this lack of knowledge, so let me flip the bad news in a good news and let me explain how to avoid reloading apps with Eclipse.
Right click on your, say, web project and “Debug as”, “Debug on Server”. Now code.
I can hear you: “Whaaaaaatt? THAT simple!?!?“.
Yes, that simple.
March 18th, 2007 at 12:44 am
Is the Debug mode slower than executing your agent inside the JVM?
If this is the case, I think your agent is still needed, at least for me!
March 18th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
it shouldn’t be, and btw you shouldn’t “feel” any speed loss, as class redefinition occurs only whn something changes, both in eclipse and in smith.
the most important difference between the two, imho, is the fact that the eclipse one is integreted into eclipse, and so you receive alert popups instead of console logs :)
anyway, tomorrow I’ll release version 0.7 that should rapidly become 1.0
Smith is too near its first release to just abadon it