oSpy visualizations

Some of you might have seen oSpy’s visualization stuff. Basically it has a few visualizers that build visualizations on top of the parsed protocol data and shows you the result in a neat timeline view with each context (usually a network connection) in a column of its own, side by side. For example:

One thing that has started to really annoy me is the fact that oSpy doesn’t run on multiple platforms. Typically, as a Linux/OS X developer working on an inter-operable replacement for some Windows-only software, you need to either have a Windows installation in dual-boot or in a virtual machine, or have someone do that for you. This is something that’s usually 5-10 minutes work, and you have what you need. The really annoying part is that usually you’ll spend hours studying the trace, and having to use a Windows-installation just for this task feels really unnecessary. So, what I envisioned was that if I could export the raw data that these visualizations were built from to XML, one could write a neat little script that would parse this and output HTML, SVG, or whatever you want. I added this feature in a hurry, and Ali took the challenge of writing a converter that would output an HTML visualization right away, and shortly afterwards he had something working, which you can see here. Check out Ali’s blog post about this for more info about this. Really great piece of work there Ali — you rock!

~ by oleandre on March 4, 2007.