last change: 2017-06-25

The access to data of a running system is a proper way to find out bugs, study the behaviour in special cases or influence the behaviour of any application. The Inspector is a tool running on PC. The Inspector Communication Protocoll is defined as a standard UDP protocoll. The access to all data on any target system in C/C++ is done using reflection. The principle of reflection is adapted from Java to C/C++. It runs for Java application too, of corse

The reflection access supports especially dynamic allocated data (on startup time usual), it is not restricted to access static data. The data should be structured via any references starting from a top level data object. The reflection access is proper to use for an embedded system of 16- or 32-bit which has enough memory. The reflection needs 48 byte per member of a structure. But this information can be stored on ROM. The access is done typically via ethernet socket connection. The access with serial interface is possible too.

For small systems without String processing capability or with less memory the reflection information can be hold in a target proxy written in C running on PC or on a communication processor. The communication to the target processor is lightweight, maybe via Dual Port RAM access, seriall or via simple UDP access.