[nupstone]

Hi,

I’ve just discovered the easy way to debug struts apps. Add log4j to my WEB-INF/lib folder, and put the following in WEB-INF/classes/log4j.properties

# Global logging configuration
log4j.rootLogger=ERROR, stdout

# Struts
log4j.logger.org.apache.struts.action=DEBUG

# My app - based on ibatis pattern
log4j.logger.com.ibatis.struts.BeanAction=DEBUG


# Console output...
log4j.appender.stdout=org.apache.log4j.ConsoleAppender
log4j.appender.stdout.layout=org.apache.log4j.PatternLayout
log4j.appender.stdout.layout.ConversionPattern=%5p [%t] - %m%n

How about configuring some logging by default. It’s great, and would have saved me a day learning the hard way (in total).

Yep.. I could have bought a book too… but just learned more in 5 mins watching what happens when I navigate a web app than from all I gleaned from PDFs and web pages on Struts.

😀

[Riyad Kalla]

I don’t know that we will go changing our wizards right away though as its best for us (as a tool provider) to provide the most default out-of-box experience. This logging information is covered in the Struts docs, so I suppose if anyone was so inclined they would hunt it down or search for this post 😉

Again thank you for posting it, it is an excellent source of information.

[nupstone]

Thanks Riyad.
Yes. The more we share what works, the more chance of finding what we need somewhere like in these forums.

When you say “most default out-of-box experience”, I don’t get that that works for developers.

What you provide us with is an IDE, which contains a debugger. I invite you to reconsider the notion of what a debugger is.

I propose that a powerful debugger is a tool that gives you the fastest route to finding why something didn’t work.

So, if I were developing the struts code, then a Java source level debugger would be useful. However, if I’m developing Struts-based solutions, especially if I’m only restructuring by making changes to struts-config.xml and to JSP pages, the Java debugger is going to be of little use for me.

I that case, my “debugger” is having the struts.action package showing me what’s happening.

I think that a log4j configurator as part of MyEclipse would be awesome, you could turn on/off debug levels from the package tree 😀

Do you get where we’re coming from here ? Maybe the thing is not so much struts, as giving really quick and direct access to logging for all Web apps.

Many thanks.

Neale

[Riyad Kalla]

Neale,
As far as being a developer is concerned, I think this is a really cool idea… let me pass it by some others.

[nupstone]

Yeah… I surprised myself with that one 8)

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