Remote Debugging Java Applications

After my previous article about Remote Debugging .NET Applications using Visual Studio 2010, I was curious to see how Remote Debugging works for Java Applications. This blog post covers Remote Debugging Java Applications using NetBeans 7.0.

The basic concepts of Remote Debugging are the same for .NET and Java but the process of setting up the host and remote computers varies between Visual Studio and NetBeans. Similar to the .NET application used in the previous post, the screen shots correspond to a simple Java application which would popup a MessageDialog on a button click. Get the code here.

Remote Debugging .NET Applications

From the past few days I have been stuck in resolving a bug which cropped up in one of my applications after it went to Production. The worst part was that it was a machine-specific issue and we couldn’t reproduce it in any of our development systems. While trying to find a solution for this, I came across the concept of Remote Debugging.

Remote debugging is debugging a remotely running application through a development environment running on a system other than the one running the app. This is done by connecting the remote system to the system containing the development environment (in turn the debugger) through Sockets. Theoretically this is achieved in two steps -

• The remote computer would open a socket and listen to debug instructions through it. These instructions are feed to the application that is being debugged and the application responds appropriately
• The debugger would connect to the socket opened by the remote system and send instructions through it