#3 jdb interface enhancements

[Paul Kinnucan]

Carlos Konstanski [ckonstanski@pippiandcarlos.com]

> I have tried using both jdb and jdebug, and finally stuck with jdebug,
> although it requires me to restart the debugger a lot of times before
> working properly. But it provides the nice feature of object browser
> when its working fine. I find it troublesome to use the jdb as I have
> to key in the component i wanted to view, since the jdb prompt does
> not have code completion. Was wondering whether anyone have tried
> hooking speedbar to jdb to make object browser a bit easier.
>
> Cheers,
> Phuah Yee Keat

Does JDE already already have CEDET dependencies? If not, the introduction of such a dependency would have to be carefully considered. I find that M-/ works pretty well for completing strings that have been previously displayed in the jdb buffer. But I agree that smarter completion would be neat. If such a feature is added to JDE, perhaps it should be part of JDE itself. How hard would it be to list all the available java symbols in a completion buffer? Probably not all that hard, especially when a lot of the required utilities are already written, and we have the beanshell at our disposal.

Another, easier feature I would like to see: the jdb buffer gives us command history with the up and down arrows. But the history is lost when jdb is stopped and restarted. It would be nice if the history were saved to a file.

Here's another feature dream: you know how java hashmaps have a table that stores the buckets? The table is an array that is padded to length 16 by default. If you have only one item stored in the hashmap, that means you have to have to type the following into the jdb buffer to find the value:

dump myHashMap.table[0]
dump myHashMap.table[1]
dump myHashMap.table[2]
...
dump myHashMap.table[15]

until you find the bucket that is not null. It would be nice if we could introduce some jdb "meta-commands" that could automate certain repetitive tasks like this one. In this case, a command that would spit out all the values of an entire array with one meta-command would suffice. Then I would only have to type something like:

dumparray myHashMap.table

Carlos Konstanski