ddd, gdb, jdb and java: debuging on linux

[Luiz Otavio L. Zorzella]

Hi,

I've been missing a good debuger for java on linux for quite some
time. It was then that I found this on the ddd
(http://www.cs.tu-bs.de/softech/ddd/) manual, under "News":

**************

- JDB support.  DDD now also supports JDB as inferior debugger.  All
  important JDB features are available via the GUI.

- Java support.  Requires GDB 4.17 or later (or JDB, of course).  All
  data display features are available in Java.

**************

Well, I went nuts, 'cause ddd is the cream of the crop, I personally
think... And I went to try it for myself. After guessing a lot
(couldn't find a straight documentation on ddd for this), I found that
a "ddd --jdb &" does the first trick (i.e. to use jdb as back end for
ddd).

It's somewhat cumbersome, as you have to restart things every time
your program exits (and starting jdb takes quite some time), but the
worst is: I could not display any variable... It tells me my variable
is not valid in that context. But I could do breakpoints, "steps" and
"nexts", etc...

Well, now I could not figure out how to do the second trick
(i.e. debug java with gdb). I have gdb 4.17, but I couldn't find a way
to use it to debug a java program.

Did any of you folks have success on this?

Thanks a lot!

-- 
Luiz Otavio L. Zorzella                Computer Engineer
[EMAIL PROTECTED]