> I use Visual Age for Java . I should look into that but I can't afford to buy stuff like that right now. This whole situation is aweful. I looked into log4j, and it looks like it has tons of features, except it doesn't have the one feature which I really want, which is being able to log a string to a file. It can log a string to a Writer, but then how do I declare a global writer variable that it can write to? Is there a way to declare absolutely global static objects in Tomcat? Why can't there be something as simple as log("string", "filename") which I can just call anywhere, any time, and it writes the string to the file? Under Tomcat 4, System.out.println doesn't even work. All I want is to see why my class method isn't doing what I think it should do.
I'm about to throw away my project and go back to PHP. Java may be powerful, but if I can't debug stuff, then anything more complex than "hello world" is nearly intractable. Java is so widely used. Surely there is some kind of logging mechanism that works easily with minimal dependencies? Sometimes some parts of working with Java are so powerful that it's hard to do basic things with them.