IT Troubleshooter | Harper Mann » Debugging Versus Troubleshooting

February 14, 2006 | Comments: (0)

Debugging Versus Troubleshooting

TAGS: J2EE

Often I hear developers talking about how they don't understand system administrators and why they are so primitive when it comes to finding and fixing problems. What most developers do not understand is there can be a significant different between the tools appropriate for development environments and the tools safe for production environments. Here is a good example. This is from a recent post entitled Guerilla Debugging for Java by Russ Olsen.

I love Eclipse. I really do. Eclipse has made creating, and especially debugging Java code so much easier that it is hard to imagine living without it. And that last bit is the problem. Sometimes we have to live without Eclipse. I have worked for customers who run very large and complicated J2EE applications, who for security reasons they will not let Eclipse within 200 yards of their servers. Dont even ask. Then there are the times where I have been ssh-ed in to some machine, trying to figure out what is going wrong without the benefit of a GUI. Very little opportunity for an Eclipse session there. Finally, I have been up against Java applications with such an enormous memory footprint that Eclipse would have been the IDE that broke the camels 2 Gig memory limit.

What do you do when cruel fate separates you from your favorite IDE? You resort to the kind of techniques that programmers used before Eclipse...

Do you have a good story of living in production environments without your development environment tools? Write me with your story at thebaum@splunk.com.

Posted by Michael Baum on February 14, 2006 07:27 AM

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