The computer science community has shown a woeful lack of interest in debugging, which given the huge economic cost of debugging is somewhat mysterious. However, there may be signs of "green shoots" in the desert landscape of debugging tools.

The most important single ingredient in the formula of success is knowing how to get along with people. (Theodore Roosevelt)

Recently, I had the chance to interview Christof Wittig, CEO of db4objects (www.db4o.com).

Unless you work in the telecommunications industry your knowledge of how it works is likely to be quite limited, therefore it is worth describing the basics.

This article demonstrates a technique for tracking exceptions across process boundaries in distributed systems using Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs); data from log files, bug reports, and on-screen error messages can then be correlated, allowing specific errors to be pinpointed.

In my last article I set the scene for what I hope will be a series of provocative and informative articles. In the article I described the plight of Pete and his vain efforts to change development processes at his place of work.

Revision control is a critical part of any significant development project. Having secure full time access to your repository from wherever you are can be important. In some environments, such as open source projects, it's absolutely crucial to the functioning of the development team.

To summarize, as memory goes too low, garbage collection could kick in, but it in turn needs memory to maintain a traversal stack … Quite a catch-22.

This final part of the series will step outside the domain of standard C and investigate a pattern for event-driven applications. The REACTOR pattern decouples different responsibilities and allows applications to demultiplex and dispatch events from potentially many clients.

Before I start, this is going to be fun. Understand? Fun. Not dull, but fun. I intend writing this in a banana suit with my feet in a bucket of warm rice pudding[1]. That's how much fun it's going to be!

J2SE 5.0 has been available for download since the end of 2004. This new release included many changes and enhancements to the Java platform such as speed and stability. Additionally, some changes were made to the Java language itself.