At 10:07 AM 6/27/00 -0400, you wrote: > As someone who asked one of those FAQs on here, maybe I can help a little >too. Maybe even this time I won't be too redundant. > > First off, I've been an (X|Lucid|FSF)Emacs user for 10+ years, but never >really tried the Lisp stuff. I'm really just a user. > > It's really difficult to really find what I am looking for when it comes to >JDE. One the web site, it appears to want to be a navigation/toc on the left >frame, contents on the right. So then why does seemingly every link pop up a >new window? It makes navigating the site looking for something more >difficult than it has to be, at least for me. > The main TOC for the JDE website has 14 entries. Of these, othree open new frames. Of these, one is the JDE user's guide, which has its own TOC, so to open this in the contents pane of the main frameset would be ugly. The other two are the contributions page and the troubleshooting guide. I suppose that when I created these a couple of year's ago I was planning on them also having TOCs. Anyway, when I get a chance I'll change them to display in the main pane of the main frame. Sorry. > Searching the mailing list is extremely frustrating. For a while, every >time I hit the ';' key, it would insert a return and indent me on the next >line. I really did not want this behavior. I was able to turn it off in >C-mode, but it would come back whenever I entered JDE. Just try searching >the mailing list archive for that one. There were a couple of variables I >figured were involved, searching for them revealed every person who included >their .emacs in the message or other helpful debugging content. So I was >afraid to post on here again and lived with it for a while until I finally >had some time to track it down. > > As for additional docs on JDEbug, the existing ones were nearly adequate to >get me going. Never using JPDA before, I didn't realize that the Classic JIT >in 1.2.2 didn't like the debug options and would give an illegal access >error in windows. Apparently HotSpot is OK with it, and looking at the Sun >JPDA site I found that -Xnoagent and -Djava.compiler=NONE were necessary. >Had these two flags been mentioned on the JDEbug page, I would have been up >and running in minutes of curiosity. > These were inadvertently omitted from the doc. When you are writing doc at 3 am and anxious to get features into the hands of users, errors tend to occur. Sorry. > As an aside, JDEBug works much better than the Cafe debugger for debugging >EJBs in WebLogic 5.1. > > As another aside, while on the topic of useful JDEbug tidbits ... > > Setting a breakpoint before attaching to a process is pointless, it just >gets ignored. > You are dealing with JDEbug 1.0; there are lot of areas that need polishing, one of them is breakpoint handling. These issues will be addressed in upcoming releases. > I have no idea why I can't get the CLI window up, and in some situations >would give anything to get that window. > JDEbug currents supports the CLI window only for processes that it launches. For these processes, you can display the CLI buffer by selecting JDEbug->Show Buffer->CLI. I'm not sure whether it is possible to connect to the standard I/O of attached processes. I plan to investigate this issue and will provide CLI support if JPDA supports it. A word of explanation. The Java side of JDEbug was written last summer by Amit Kumar, a summer intern hired by Sun's JPDA team specifically for the purpose of helping me develop JDEbug. I wrote the Lisp side of the debugger. Amit's Java code is basically a first draft. It does the basic job but there are many rough spots. I am currently in the process of learning, revamping, and upgrading Amit's code. This should result in a steady, gradual increase in functionality and robustness over upcoming releases. My plan is to make many small releases in order to get the improvements into your hands ASAP. > Setting a breakpoint on a method signature does not perform a "stop in >package.Class.method" like one would expect, it merely sets a breakpoint on >a line that will never be hit. > Yes, this is a planned improvement to the breakpoint feature set. > And lastly, I am more than willing to help out in any way I can. I *really* >like JDE! What can/should I do? > You can contribute in any way you like, including fixing bugs in the lisp and/or Java code, implementing new features or enhancing existing ones, writing documentation, or simply reporting bugs and providing suggestions for enhancements. I can use any help you can give me. - Paul
