I just noticed this project (went to the summer of code while looking in
to mkmf). I was wondering how it's coming along? Reading up on it, it
seems like a great deal of the project intention is to be able to
visualise ruby's objects really nicely; a representation of the code
with "click to place a break point", and also a better irb are other
goals.

It's struck me quite a few times (and there was a post a few days ago on
this subject) that a promising approach to visualising Ruby's objects,
and probably also interacting with them, could be created using an
embedded web server. If you want a ruby script to provide inspection of
objects at run time, then you include the relevent library and start up
serving HTML on some port.

At it's simplest, it would just have to create some HTML from an Object
instance. You could use style sheets to pretty up and customise the
representation. I can then imagine that it would be advantageous to be
able to customise the HTML output on a class by class (and included
module) basis (enumerables show their content, for instance, and the
result of known "accessor" methods are displayed too).

While making it web based imposes some restrictions, it seems to me to
also give some pretty neat bonusses. Who doesn't have a browser, or
means of rendering HTML these days? It would be very portable. Also, it
offers an easy entry in to remote debugging.

This seems to me like an obviously good idea, so I'm pretty sure that I
must have missed out a gaping flaw in it ;) Sorry if I'm being very
stupid here. I really keep meaning to try and write it myself, but I
never quite have the need for it. Perhaps that's the reason it's not
been done (to my knowledge) by someone else?

Cheers,
  Benjohn