eye 1.0

A generic web-based browser of ZODB databases.

Overview

Eye provides a browser-based UI to browse the contents of a ZODB database.

It can browse “broken” ZODB objects, so you don’t have to have your application code present in the Python environment to use the tool.

It can also be used as a generic Python object browser.

Installation

At this point Eye has been tested on Python 2.6.

Eye has a few dependencies. Therefore it’s recommended to install it in a virtualenv or buildout to keep it isolated from other software on your system.

Assuming you have virtualenv installed, the following commands will install Eye:

$ virtualenv --no-site-packages eye
$ cd eye
$ bin/pip install eye

This creates a new virtualenv in the eye directory, and installs the eye console script into the bin subdirectory.

Basic usage

Inspect a ZODB filestorage

$ bin/eye [path to Data.fs]

Then open your browser to http://localhost:8080/

Persistent objects are shown in blue; other objects included in the pickles of persistent objects are shown in black.

Inspect an arbitrary object

>>> from datetime import datetime
>>> foo = datetime.now()
>>> import eye; eye.eye(foo)

Similar tools

• zope2.zodbbrowser: Runs in Zope 2; provides a bit more app-specific info.

• zodbbrowser: Based on the Zope 3.4.0 KGS; displays historical object revisions.

• z3c.zodbbrowser: An apparently unfinished GSOC project; based on wxPython.

Credits

Thanks to:

• Roberto Allende and menttes. The initial inspiration and code is from their zope2.zodbbrowser.

• Jim Fulton for creating the ZODB.

• The creators of the WSGI tools used by Eye.

• The creators of the JQuery, JQuery UI, and Dynatree libraries.

• Elizabeth Leddy

• Hanno Schlichting

Changelog

1.0 - 2011-11-05

• Only serve on local network interface. [davisagli]

• Remove non-functional paste.app_factory entry point. [davisagli]

• Do our own traversal and rendering rather than depending on Pyramid. [davisagli]

• Provide better representation of persistent BTree structures. [hannosch]

1.0b2 - 2011-03-19

• Work around issue with traversing objects with slashes in their key. [davisagli]

• Handle case where objects providing interfaces not present in the Python environment can’t be unpickled even into Broken objects. [davisagli]

• Cast non-string dict keys into strings for the sake of traversal. [davisagli]

• Handle case where inspect.getmembers hits an AttributeError. [davisagli]

• Handle case where ZODB state is not a mapping. [davisagli]

• Make it possible to browse ZODB BTrees (as long as they’re not too big, anyway). [davisagli]

1.0b1 - 2011-03-19

• Initial release. [davisagli]