Logging, Debugging, Monitoring, and Profiling

We looked at logging, debugging, monitoring, and profiling techniques in Chapter 9, "Logging, Debugging, Monitoring, and Profiling." However, I merely scratched the surface with the material I covered.

Logging can be used minimally for simple tracing and debugging, or it can be used for security-related audit-trail logging locally. Writing your own custom logging extensions using JDK logging or log4j logging is relatively simple, so you could write logging classes for various types of tasks. Also, logging can be done at a local level or remotely, which opens up some interesting opportunities.

Debugging is somewhat of an art because developers like to approach this in different ways. Whereas some developers debug using print statements, others enjoy GUI debugging. If you like GUI-based debugging, investigate the Eclipse debugger further. We covered a lot of the basics of Chapter 8enough to get you debugging in Eclipse effectively. However, when you begin working with the Eclipse debugger (if you don't already), you will likely find unique ways of debugging using watch expressions, conditional breakpoints, and more.

We looked at extremely basic monitoring techniques in Chapters 9 and 10. This is a whole world in its own and requires an in-depth look into the Java Management Extensions (JMX) technology. Visit java.sun.com for details on this technology.

I briefly discussed profiling Java applications in Chapter 9. Profiling requires much more investigation if your application has a need for performance tuning. For example, Sun's NetBeans IDE has a wonderful profiler and the Eclipse SDK has profiler plug-ins available for it. As I mentioned in Chapter 9, a lot of open source Java profilers are also worth a look.