Question

I have some J2EE application, and I’m able to see the what that application is doing in it’s web interface. I also have the source code for the application. I want to realize what code is actually executed, when I click something in the web interface.

What is the best method to find out this? I was thinking of putting the breakpoint on the first line of each method, but it is quite annoying to do it manually :-), so I hope that is some better method.

Thanks for answering.

Answer 1

Your application is deployed on an application server. You can debug it by starting the server in debugging mode. JBoss for example has a nice tool suite for eclipse. With the tools, debugging is just a press of a button away (the one with the bug).

Logging is definitely an option too, though you will not get as much detail. Personally I prefer logback over commons for a number of reasons.

If you have no clue, where to set your breakpoints/ where to log, and the package structure is not helpful, you could start with methods in your EJBs. Look for annotations like @Stateless, @EJB (to find injection points and go from there) for example.
If there are servlet classes, start there, or if it is a JSF frontend, look for @ManagedBean annotations.