Introduction to Zephyr

There are two common ways to debug code. The first way is to use a debugger to check the state of the code at a given point in time and trace code execution. The second way is to use print statements (or more generally log files) to trace events when they happen. Zephyr proposes a third easy way.

Zephyr is a software for Java to visualize over time the value of code variables. At runtime, Zephyr uses Java reflexivity to parse the code and register objects and data to be visualized. Through a generic graphical user interface, developers can then browse and monitor at different time-scale the data while the code is running. Zephyr is an online debugger particularly suited for simulations, games or online numerical computations.

Zephyr is distributed as a standalone executable to run Java jars, Python or Clojure scripts, and as a collection of Eclipse plugins to integrate with Eclipse RCP applications for debugging.

Introduction tutorials

• Read large log files with Zephyr
• Zephyr for Python (Jython)
• Zephyr for Clojure
• Zephyr for Java

Download

• Binaries for Mac OS X, Windows, Linux
• The source code is available on github

Links:

• Zephyr was developed for experiments in Reinforcement Learning with RLPark and is an unexpected outcome of the Critterbot project.
• I discovered the product Chronon. It is interesting and complementary to Zephyr.
• Zephyr on the Eclipse marketplace