What is "remote debugging" on tomcat?

Question

I'm not asking how to do it. I'm asking what it is. I asked my coworkers if we could setup remote debugging on our smoke-testing server and step through the code in eclipse from our developer PCs, and they looked at me funny.

Does remote debugging mean something other than "debug just like always, but remotely, with an IDE on your computer and the application running on a different machine"?

I've never done it and it looks like something that will take me hours to setup, and I doubt I could get permission to research it just to find out if it is what I hoped it was, so I'm asking you all if it is what I hope it is.

Answer 1

Yes, you can start the server in debug mode and connect to it from another machine using Eclipse. It is not hard to setup, read here: http://wiki.apache.org/tomcat/FAQ/Developing

It works exactly as you describe, using JPDA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Platform_Debugger_Architecture