Thursday, August 18, 2005

Debugging in Java

When I was first introduced to Java, most of the program debugging was done through console/file logging. (using the ubiquitous System.out.println).

But today, we have so many GUI debuggers at our disposal. IDEs contain their own debuggers (such as IBM VisualAge for Java, Symantec VisualCafe, and Borland JBuilder, IBM Eclipse), Stand-alone GUIs (such as Jikes, Java Platform Debugger Architecture javadt, and JProbe) ,Text-based and command-line driven (such as Sun JDB)
My favourite is the Eclipse Debugger and it serves most of my purposes.
But there are some other cool stand-alone debuggers available too. Here are links to a few of them:
http://www.bluemarsh.com/java/jswat/
http://www.debugtools.com/index.html
http://freshmeat.net/projects/jikesdebugger/

If any of the above still do not meet your needs, the Java platform has introduced the JavaDebugging APIs, which you may use to create a debugger that specifically meets yourneeds. The revised Java Debugger (JDB) serves as both a proof of concept for the Java DebuggingAPI, and as a useful debugging tool. It was rewritten to use the Java Debug Interface (JDI)and is part of the JDK.

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