Debugging distributed object applications with the Eclipse platform

Debugging distributed applications is a well known challenge within the realm of Computer Science. Common problems faced by developers include: lack of an observable global state, lack of a central location from where to monitor possible states, non-deterministic execution, heisenbugs, and many others. There are currently many good techniques available which could be employed in building a tool for circumventing some of those issues, especially when considering wide-spread middleware-induced models such as Java RMI, CORBA or Microsoft .NET based applications.In this paper, we introduce an extended symbolic debugger for Eclipse which besides usual source-level debugging capabilities, adds to the abstraction pool a distributed thread concept, central to causality in any synchronous-call distributed object application.