The source code of an application and the running application are typically two distinct elements in the everyday life of a software engineer. Usually we bridge the gap between those two worlds manually and if a bugs shows up, we use a source-level debugger to dive into the details of the running app. In this session we introduce a new concept to bridge this gap that we implemented as part of the Spring Tools (for Eclipse, Visual Studio Code, Eclipse Theia, and more): live information hovers.
The live information hovers extract runtime information from the running Spring application and visualize this information embedded in the source code of the application - at the exact right location. That way, developers can see exactly what is going on in their running Spring application from within the sourc code, e.g. to see which beans are active, which beans are wired to which other breans, which request mappings are active, to name just a few samples.
While the initial implementation is very specific to Spring Boot, the concept behind these live hover information can be adopted more broadly, across languages and frameworks, even as deeper integration for well-established tools like profilers.
The session will introduce the concept, show live information hovers in action, discuss the technical details, and provide an outlook towards a broader use of this concept beyond Spring.