Graphical debugger with Eclipse Sapphire and JDT

In this presentation, we will discuses our experience building a graphical task flow debugger for Oracle Enterprise Pack for Eclipse, with two Eclipse projects: the Eclipse JDT and Eclipse Sapphire UI development framework.

Eclipse JDT Debug project provides a rich set of extensions to allow third party plugin developers to extend the Eclipse Java debugger. While most of the JDT debugger features like source lookup and breakpoint are based on line based text editor, we faced the challenger of modeling and presenting the debugger context in a graphical view.

Eclipse Sapphire framework greatly improves our UI development productivity. With the new diagram editing features in Sapphire 0.3, the developers can focus on modeling the semantics of the data and declaring the how the data it to be presented, instead of focusing on the rendering, layouts and data binding.

In this talk, we will review important Eclipse Debug extension points and discuss techniques wiring debugger elements like breakpoint presentation and source lookup mechanism in a debugger with graphical context. These techniques will not be limited to JDT, and can be applied to any debugger developed with Eclipse Debug framework and Sapphire.