Debugging

Unlike other frameworks that are based on containers, light-4j is based on a light-weight HTTP core and implemented as POJOs. That means you don’t need to use a remote debugger but simply need to debug locally within your IDE. In most of the cases, we are using the unit or integration test cases to trigger the debugger.

IntelliJ IDEA

The best IDE for debugging is IntelliJ IDEA, and the free community edition is more than enough. You don’t need to open the source code for the dependencies as it can decompile them automatically. Of course, you can load the real source code if you want to see the inline comments.

The following image shows the “Run/Debug Configurations” window with the main class set as “com.networknt.server.Server”. For any other VM Options, you can put it into the VM options section.

idea-debug

Here is a video that show several options.

Eclipse

To be added.

Alternative Configuration

Most of our users create unit or integration test cases in the src/test folder to ensure that the code in the src/main folder works as expected. The unit and integration test cases also help to ensure that new changes won’t break the existing codebase. The other benefit for these test cases is to be an entry point for the debugger. You can set the breakpoints in your handlers or any middleware handlers and start a debug session with one of the test cases to start the server and place the right request to trigger the logic in your handlers. Read More »

Debug TLS Handshake

When you have service to service communications between microservices, HTTPS is a must, and we have both client and server keystore and truststore to support one-way TLS or two-way TLS. For most developers, manipulating keystore and truststore with keytool would be new for them. If it is not working, turn on the network debugger would help a lot. Just put the following line into the VM options in the run/debug configurations window to enable the net debugging. Read More »