Configuring for remote server debugging

[Eric Owens]

Hello and thanks for the group!

I've recently been tasked with supporting an internal web application that currently has no support for me to draw upon.  The system is hosted internally (but still remote from me) and I am trying to figure out how to do my debugging.  The system is running on Apache 2.2 and using CF10.  I have accessed and imported the project into Eclipse - Kepler running the plugin version of CFEclipse. 

Drawing upon experience using a major competing IDE, I could set a remote web server to start my application from while working on a project.  With the exception of a little python and C/C++, I'm new to Eclipse for the most part and absolutely new to ColdFusion, so please speak slowly -- I'm not sure I'm using the correct terminology in regard to CF/Eclipse.

According to Eclipse RDS Support, there should have some kind of RDS tool in some Eclipse extensions.  The internet tells me that it should be available in the ColdFusion Support Center, but nothing of the sort seems to be available there for download. I've looked in Preferences - CFEclipse, Preferences - Run/Debug, and Preferences - Remote Systems but am not finding anything that makes sense in allowing me to connect to the remote web server to do any debugging on. 


Your thoughts are much appreciated!

[Alan Holden]

Adobe provides for a Developer's edition / license during the installation process of the ColdFusion server. This version contains a web server, runs on a localhost port, and will cost you nothing. D/L and run the server installer, select the internal server and developer's options carefully.

I encourage you to run a local development version of the CF server, develop (and debug) against that, and commit / promote your code back to the remote (client) server as each small phase is complete. Running Eclipse against a remote machine has always been a painful experience for me, it's so much faster (and in this case, free) to work locally first.

Others can address the possible tie-in between CFEclipse and debugging daemons, but I've found that the information produced by literal errors (when the CF Server is configured to provide robust debug & exception info right in the web page), is more than enough to get started.

Al

On 2/9/2016 3:11 PM, Eric Owens wrote:

Hello and thanks for the group!

I've recently been tasked with supporting an internal web application that currently has no support for me to draw upon.  The system is hosted internally (but still remote from me) and I am trying to figure out how to do my debugging.  The system is running on Apache 2.2 and using CF10.

I have accessed and imported the project into Eclipse - Kepler running the plugin version of CFEclipse.  I've looked in Preferences - CFEclipse, Preferences - Run/Debug, and Preferences - Remote Systems but am not finding anything that makes sense in allowing me to connect to the remote web server to do any debugging on. 

Drawing upon experience using a major competing IDE, I could set a remote web server to start my application from while working on a project.  With the exception of a little python and C/C++, I'm new to Eclipse for the most part and absolutely new to ColdFusion, so please speak slowly -- I'm not sure I'm using the correct terminology in regard to CF/Eclipse.

Your thoughts are much appreciated!

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[Eric Owens]

Thank you for your response, Alan.  The remote server is already a development server.  It is an internally hosted system which allows me a development server, a testing server for pre-production consumption on a wider scale, and then the final production server.

Also, anything that has to do with "localhost" is going to fail, anyway.  We use a cookie based authentication mechanism which requires the "localhost" to actually use the FQDN of the machine requesting authentication; if a web server is on "localhost," the request will not be authenticated at the domain level for a user to even be able enter their credentials.

It would really be much more helpful to have debugging capability on a server that I know is going to be identical to the production server in both settings and system configuration.

[Charlie Arehart]

Eric, check out fusion-debug.com, to learn about FusionDebug, from the makers of FusionReactor. It’s not free, but it was the first step debugger for CF and remains in some minds the best. It will give you the interactive step debugging against CF (or Railo or Lucee) from within CFEclipse that you seek.

You may know that Adobe CFBuilder (also built-in Eclipse) includes a debugger also, if you may want to consider switching to that, but since this is a CFE group, I’ll assume you’ve already made that decision.

Finally, there was for a short time (in the CF8 timeframe) before CFBuilder came out that Adobe offered what they called the “eclipse extensions for ColdFusion”, and that offered the CF-specific debugging perspective which both tools above do also offer, and you could add that to Eclipse (and CFE), but that was removed once CFBuilder came out.

So really, at this point, FusionDebug will be the best solution for your needs. It’s really very good.

/charlie