Workstation 6.0 beta 3 has now been released. Tony D’Souza talks about developing the new Eclipse plug-in that allows developers to debug code on a remote machine from the comfort of their own local IDE. Still think virtualization is just for running Windows on Linux?
Link: quikchange: Making remote debugging easier to use.
Shortly after joining VMware, I took on the challenge of making it
easier for software developers to debug code running in a production
environment where they don’t have all the tools normally available to
them during development. Traditionally, the only way to accomplish this
has been through the use of remote debugging. However, while remote
debugging can be extremely useful in certain situations, getting it to
work is sufficiently cumbersome that it has remained the domain of the
truly desperate. There are two parts to the process: running the code
in debug mode on the production machine and then attaching a debugger
on the development machine to the code running on the production
machine. …When activated, the plugin powers on the selected VM if necessary, shares the project folder containing the bytecode with the guest OS, finds an available dynamic port to use for remote debugging, looks for a JVM on the guest in the most likely locations until it find one, executes the application in debug mode and finally attaches the Eclipse visual debugger to the previously determined port on the VM. When the application is terminated, the plugin removes the shared folder so as not to leave a mess.
