Hammertime (GitHub repo) is a new interactive error console for Ruby by Avdi Grimm, modelled after those found in the Squeak/Smalltalk and LISP environments. It fills some of the same roles as ruby-debug, except in a less intrusive and more Ruby-esque fashion. Be warned though.. currently it’s for Ruby 1.8.x only.

Installation is via RubyGems (gem install hammertime) and the library is activated in your app with require ‘hammertime’. That’s it; you’re good to go. Once activated, any exception raised in your app will result in a Hammertime prompt appearing where you can choose from a number of options, including:

• Continue (process the exception normally)
• Ignore (proceed without raising an exception)
• Permit by type (don’t ask about future errors of this type)
• Permit by line (don’t ask about future errors raised from this point)
• Backtrace (show the call stack leading up to the error)
• Debug (start a debugger)
• Console (start an IRB session)

For more info, a walkthrough of a basic debugging process using Hammertime is shown in Avdi’s Hammertime blog post. Read More

Rackamole (GitHub repo) is a Rack application that lets you to monitor the interactions between users and your own Rack-based application (e.g. any Rails or Sinatra app). As well as pumping out information to the console or a log file, there’s a Web interface called Wackamole to give you the skinny on your app activity.

Rackamole’s creator, Fernand Galiana (also of ZiYa charting library fame), says that Rackamole is well suited for determining what parts of your application you need to work on next. It traps and records feature usage, performance issues, and application exceptions, and by integrating as a middle layer between your HTTP server and your Web app, it can work with almost any backend system out of the box. Read More