Insert Witty Irony Here

Friday May 01, 2009

Debug usability improvement for v3 servers

Sometimes, it is easy to be blind to an obvious use-case.

In this case, I had gotten so 'trained' to Debug a project, that I completely forgotten about how hard it is to attach the debugger to the server when the user does a 'Start in Debug Mode'.

Luckily, someone made it clear and I was able to make the situation a bit better, by exposing a new Server property for servers based on the GlassFish v3 code.

The property, Address to use, starts off undefined. The first time you debug a project or start the server in debug mode, the port is selected, if you haven't defined it already. After the value is set, it remains constant unless you...

• uncheck the 'Address to use' check box
• change the value by hand.

While I was working on this, I discovered something that surprised me. If you start the JPDA debugger with a bogus address (when you are using the socket transport), the JVM and debugger will start. A random port is selected and you can proceed. I like interfaces that are forgiving and try to succeed where I have failed.

I was pretty excited about this at first, but soon realized that I could not leverage this 'forgiveness' in the IDE.

Oh, well.

(2009-05-01 12:39:53.0) Permalink