Developing (and Debugging) Java Servlets on Linux.

Bryan asks: "What do you use to develop, debug and test java servlets on Linux? I am especially interested in debugging tools and techniques, especially those that use Apache+mod_jserv." I've just started using mod_jserv recently and am very happy with it. Something like this could sure help my development activities and I'm sure others are looking for something like this as well.

Comments

Debugging a live servlet engine

[Xamot]

I was just meaning to look up how to do this. I found this.

To summerize, if you can start the servlet engine's VM in debug mode you can then connect to it with a remote debugger like jdb. You have to get the password from wherever the VM's standard out goes. The page I listed up above gives directions on how to do this with the JSDK's Java Web Server.

As far as other developement. I've been using iPlanet's iWS 4.1 beta. It works pretty good. I haven't tried setting Tomcat up yet, but on the Tomcat mailing list they are getting together a beta for version 3.1 which is VERY close to meeting the Servlet 2.2 specs and will be the reference implementation once it is done. The beta release canidate 1 should be up today.

As somebody else mentioned standard out and the servlet response are also good places to send information especially if you don't want to run your VM in debug mode or can't. One thing about iWS 4.1, I don't think the standard out and standard error are directed to a file by default. I had to open my own servlet logging files and redirect System.out and System.err to them myself from within a servlet.

For developement I use JBuilder on NT, and vim occasionally under linux. I have had no platform problems with moving my Java class files from NT to linux. On linux I am using the latest blackdown release of the JDK. In fact for one application I have the web server (iWS 4.1 beta) running under linux and it loads pre-compiled servlets that exist on an SMB mounted directory that exists on an NT machine. It hasn't acted any different from the web server running on NT with JRun as the servlet engine. (well I had some JSP problems, but that was a difference in implementation of the JSP specs between iWS and JRun)

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