Tuesday, September 27, 2005

Suggestion #5: Debugging with Undo

WARNING: This blog entry was imported from my old blog on blogs.sun.com (which used different blogging software), so formatting and links may not be correct.






Until now in this "column"
I've written about source code itself:
Don't use vanity tokens,
don't capitalize acronyms,
don't use tabs, and
don't (over)use logging.
Today I'd like to talk process instead: debugging.



The process of debugging usually involves mental verification:
you step through the code, and compare what you think
should be happening with what is actually happening.
As you do this, you frequently have to decide if you should
Step Into or Step Over method calls.
On the one hand, you don't want to step over a method in case
the bug is occurring within the method call. On the other hand,
if you don't know where the bug is yet, you can waste a lot of
time stepping through methods before the bug is triggered.



With the following technique however you get the best of both
worlds. The approach is as follows:
Always step over. If you detect
that the bug has happened (e.g. some return value from a method
is wrong, or a class field is changed into the bad value you're
looking for, etc. etc.) then simply Retry the method.
By retry, I mean pop the current stack frame and step back
into the method! This gives you a primitive "Undo" function.
Without restarting your program, you get to step through the method
again.



Many debuggers offer actions to pop the stack, so you can use this
technique today. What I really want however is a convenient action
which does both of these operations (pop followed by step into), and have
it located in a convenient place such as the debugging toolbar.



So I decided to try out the new NetBeans 5.0 module plugin
development support. Holy cow! - It was unbelievably easy!
In 25 minutes, I wrote a plugin (which adds a debugger toolbar action
which pops the stack and steps into in one step), I generated a plugin
bundle, installed it in the IDE and tested that it works on a simple
test program. And this was as
a first time user of the plugin support! I especially liked the "New | Action" wizard
which automatically handled everything from icon and displayname to positioning
the action in the menus and toolbars.



I'm not exaggerating - it
took just 25 minutes. And I'm not bragging either; doing all this in 25
minutes says something about the productivity of the tool, not about my programming
skills.
There's a quick-start
document
available with more information on how to build plugins in 5.0. But I
wrote the plugin while on the train commuting to work, and without a network connection
I figured it out anyway on my own.






You can download and install
the plugin yourself in
NetBeans 5.0.
As you can see, the main source file is
very trivial.



The screenshot on the right (click for full size) shows the IDE in action; notice the new action in the toolbar
(easily spottable by the ugly icon I supplied) as well as the plugin project in the navigator.



Anyway, you can use this retry technique as long as your IDE supports
Pop Topmost Stackframe. It sometimes requires a little work on your
part. If you're stepping through a method that has side effects
(such as initializing fields), you may have to account for
these. By "account for" I mean undo the side effect. Usually I handle it
by clearing out the fields in the watch window after popping the stack.
You did realize you can change values in the Value column and cause
assignment in the debugged process, right?






3 comments:

  1. Really cool! And, the best part, 25 minutes. That's productivity.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Yet, still not as cool as a plug-in for
    Omniscient Debugging.

    ReplyDelete