Graphical debuggers
Using a command-line debugger like JDB can be inconvenient. You must use explicit commands to do things like looking at the state of the variables (locals, dump), listing the point of execution in the source code (list), finding out the threads in the system(threads), setting breakpoints (stop in, stop at), etc. A graphical debugger allows you to do all these things with a few clicks and also view the latest details of program being debugged without using explicit commands.
Thus, although you may want to get started by experimenting with JDB, you’ll probably find it much more productive to learn to use a graphical debugger in order to quickly track down your bugs. During the development of this edition of this book, we began using IBM’s Eclipse editor and development environment, which contains a very good graphical debugger for Java. Eclipse is well designed and implemented, and you can download it for free from www.Eclipse.org (this is a free tool, not a demo or shareware—thanks to IBM for investing the money, time, and effort to make this available to everyone).
Other free development tools have graphical debuggers as well, such as Sun’s Netbeans and the free version of Borland’s JBuilder.
