Eclipse Debugger Rocks!
Not since the glory days of Obj-C in gdb have I been so productive with a debugger :-)
Current Three Favorite Features;
- Conditional Breakpoints
- Logical Structure
- New Detail Formatter...
Conditional Breakpoints are activated via the Breakpoints view. Right click on the breakpoint of interest, select Properties... and then activate the Enable Condition checkbox. You can type in a code snipit that will be executed to determine if the breakpoint should be hit or not.
Logical Structure hides some of the detail about the internal structure of a variable. For example a Map can be implemented in many different ways but often all we want to see is the key/value pairs. The Logical Structure feature does just that. To activate it; in the Variables view select the Show Logical Structure button in the title bar. It looks like a browser on OSX and is the second button from the left.
New Detail Formatter... with this little gem you can code the way your variable looks in the Detail panel of the Variables view. To activate, right click on a variable in the Variables view and select New Detail Formatter... menu item. Then in the code box type in method calls against the type (entrySet() for example on a java.util.Map). The Detail panel will now show the output of the code you typed in. Groovy!
There is of course more to love but I really need to finish chapter 3!
