When it comes to examining an object in Ruby, developer has several handy tools. He may use Object#inspect, p, or one of the Rails plugin that prints Ruby objects, michaeldv’s awesome_print for example. If that is not enough for you, you may try DrX.

Drx prints results in a GUI interface, showing inspected object in a diagram where you can retreive information like parent class, object and class relationships, etc. which may be real convenient.

In short: instead of showing object data, this Rails plugin focuses on showing object’s model behind your objects.

Usage is really simple, you just need to drop a line “require ‘drx’” into your Rails application and use Object#see to inspect you objects using DrX.

DrX works best on linux systems.