Hello @[email protected] <[email protected]>,

Today, I managed to debug a pretty ugly CVE with one of our services, and
was forced to use jdb because of restrictions on the environment. It was
fairly straightforward, but tedious in many ways. I understand that jdb is
better served as an ingredient in a larger tool (which is how most IDE's do
it), but every now and then, you get forced down to it if a system is
locked down enough.

Would it make sense to have a simple GUI that exposes only the most basic
parts of JDB? Similar to EditPad for JShell, where you can type /edit if
the cli ends up making things uglier than it needs to.

   - It would be super low effort to implement and maintain in the JDK.
   EditPad
   
<https://github.com/openjdk/jdk/blob/master/src/jdk.editpad/share/classes/jdk/editpad/EditPad.java>
is
   in the JDK, and it is less than 150 lines of basic boilerplate code. I
   foresee a JDB implementation being less than 300. Happy to produce a
   prototype if anyone wants.
   - It smooths out several rough points of JDB.
      - Linking sources is repetitive and tedious. A simple JFileChooser
      would simplify that greatly.
      - Being able to see help in a separate JDialog/JOptionPane would make
      the UI less cluttered.
      - Placing breakpoints/traces/watches is nice when you are actually
      looking at the code itself too in a separate text area.
      - Reduces the tunnel vision feeling of only being able to see one
      thing at one time in JDB. Each thing we want to support can be its own
      dialog.

Let me know if it makes sense.

Thank you for your time and consideration.
David Alayachew

Reply via email to