AppFuseDebug

A debugger is one of the most powerful tools in a developers toolkit. This tutorial goes over how a user can run an AppFuse based web application and associated test cases under a debugger.
In this tutorial I show screentshots of debugging an Appfuse based project using IntelliJ IDEA but the same can be done using most Java IDE's including Eclipse.

Table of Contents

• [1] Open project using an IDE
• [2] Running Test Cases in a debugger
• [3] Running your web application under Tomcat in a debugger

Open project using an IDE [#1]

• How I setup my Development Environment.
• Developing your AppFuse application in Eclipse.
  • Using AppFuse with MyEclipse: Part I and Part II.
  • AppFuse also supports IDEA 4.0 out-of-the-box, or at least the project files are included.

Running Test Cases in a debugger [#2]

• In your IDE, set breakpoints at the appropriate locations in your code
  

• Now run your test targets as usual however pass an additional system parameter in the format -Dprojectname-debug=true.
  The sample project here is named "foo" so I run ant -Dfoo-debug=true test-dao as shown below.
  

• This runs the java process in debug mode with shrared memory address projectname-debug which would be foo-debug in this case.
  The JVM suspends at this point waiting for you to connect to the java process via a remote debugger.

UPDATE 1/13/06 : Since Eclipse does not support debugging using shared memory, AppFuse has been updated to run using Socket debug mode which listens on port 4000

The screenshot below illustrates how this is done in IDEA.

• After connecting to the remote process, the java application resumes until a breakpoint in your code is hit.

You can now step through your code, examine variables, evaluate expressions etc..

Running your web application using a debugger under Tomcat [#3]

Happy Debugging!!

intellij-debugging.png		115072 bytes
testcase-debug.png		22008 bytes
intellij-setbreakpoint.png		128268 bytes
intellij-connect.png		26231 bytes