People have told me about Remote Debugging before, but yestday I set it up and it absolutely rocks!

On very large server-side code, it is so much cooler (and faster) to be able to set a breakpoint in the middle of a massive call stack (rather than just keep inserting logging code).

I picked up the required switches on the Tomcat site (Setting up Tomcat for Remote Debugging), and used the technique on a bunch of non-web apps. Also discovered you need to use the ant task to make all this happen from ant.

Eclipse is one rocking IDE, and it just keeps getting better. Setting up Remote Debugging is as simple as /Debug/Remote Debugging/New… Gotta love that. Give it the same port that you specified when lauching the remove JVM and you are in business.

Extremely cool!