What's wrong with debugging in Eclipse on Android?
- by Sebastian Dwornik
I've obviously been spoiled by Visual Studio, because although I'm just learning Android and the Eclipse environment, debugging apps in Eclipse is becoming a serious detriment to further development.
For example, Eclipse will compile this divide by zero just fine:
public class Lesson2Main extends Activity
{
/** Called when the activity is first created. */
@Override
public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
{
super.onCreate (savedInstanceState);
int i = 1 / 0;
TextView tv = new TextView (this);
tv.setText ("Hello, Android!");
setContentView (tv);
}
}
And then, when it executes it under the debugger, I will get a full screen of useless debug info, non of which actually points me to the specific line containing the error.
The stackTrace is null within the exception ('e') info tree, and it simply states a message stating 'ArithmeticException'. (that's nice, how about you point me in the direction of where you found it!?)
I've looked all over the screen and am baffled that this IDE can't get this right. Does developing with Eclipse resort everyone back to 1991 with printf() like logging at every interval then to track down bugs? Seriously.
Is there a configuration or plug-in that I'm missing to help with this?
I haven't tested this case with XCode, but if the iPhone dev. IDE handles this more like Visual Studio, then no wonder the Android marketplace has so few apps.
I'm excited about Android, but it seems that Eclipse is getting in the way.
