Chapter 24. Testing and Debugging Applications

By Tom Schwenk

IN THIS CHAPTER

• An Introduction to Software Testing

• Finding Problems Early: Unit Testing

• Gathering Information with Logging APIs

• Debugging WebLogic with an Integrated Debugger

• Best Practices

WebLogic has been designed with the capability to support very large, complicated applications that often include hundreds of use cases and can span across many existing applications in an enterprise. Given that, it's no surprise that defects arise in these applications, just as they do in other software products. When building such applications, it's important to take this fact into consideration, and to design them with capabilities for testing, debugging, and real-time logging. This chapter explores some commonly used practices and additional tools for testing and debugging within WebLogic.

In this chapter, you'll learn

• How to design, build, and maintain unit tests for an application to ensure that code modifications do not break existing functionality

• How to instrument code with logging information to monitor the health of a running system and track down problem reports

• How to use an IDE's integrated debugger to step through application code line by line