Data::Dumper::GUI

This is a very old article. It has been imported from older blogging software, and the formatting, images, etc may have been lost. Some links may be broken. Some of the information may no longer be correct. Opinions expressed in this article may no longer be held.

Everyone knows all that command-line stuff is for weirdo geeks, right? 😉 So let’s bring Data::Dumper kicking and screaming into the 21st century and give it a pretty GUI!

ddGUI.png

Introducing Data::Dumper::GUI; a GUI for Data::Dumper. It allows you to view your data structures as a tree with collapsible nodes. Data::Dumper::GUI is built using Prima (a rather nice GUI toolkit designed specifically for Perl, that supports Win32 and X11, with no dependencies and compiles pretty quickly… for a GUI toolkit) and Moo.

It has special support for Moose objects, using the metaobject protocol to introspect objects being dumped and provide additional information (superclasses, subclasses, roles, attributes, methods). It will do the same for Moo objects too (but only if Moose is loaded).

And it comes bundled with a plugin for Reply.

It’s early days; the GUI ain’t pretty enough yet. Take a peek though, and let me know if you have any ideas for improvements.