The first time you sign into developerWorks, a profile is created for you. Select information in your profile (name, country/region, and company) is displayed to the public and will accompany any content you post. You may update your IBM account at any time.

All information submitted is secure.

The first time you sign in to developerWorks, a profile is created for you, so you need to choose a display name. Your display name accompanies the content you post on developerworks.

Please choose a display name between 3-31 characters. Your display name must be unique in the developerWorks community and should not be your email address for privacy reasons.

All information submitted is secure.

My developerWorks:

My notifications:

Sign out

Select a language:

How to debug Perl applications with Eclipse

EPIC plug-in offers rich debugging environment

Martin Brown, Freelance Writer, Freelance Developer

Martin C. Brown has been a professional writer for more than eight years. He is the author of numerous books and articles across a range of topics. His expertise spans myriad development languages and platforms -- Perl, Python, Java, JavaScript, Basic, Pascal, Modula-2, C, C++, Rebol, Gawk, Shellscript, Windows, Solaris, Linux, BeOS, Mac OS/X, and more -- as well as Web programming, systems management and integration. Martin is a regular contributor to ServerWatch.com, LinuxToday.com, and IBM developerWorks, and a regular blogger at Computerworld, The Apple Blog, and other sites, as well as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for Microsoft.

Summary: Debugging Perl applications can be a frustrating process. Many Perl programmers rely on print statements and so-called "postmortem debugging." Others use the built-in Perl debugger. Neither provides a coherent execution environment for monitoring the execution of a script, and neither supports the debugging of a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) script during execution. In this tutorial, we will look at the debugging functionality offered by the Eclipse Perl Integration (EPIC) plug-in for Eclipse, which offers a rich debugging environment available and integrated with the EPIC Perl development environment.

Date: 07 Feb 2006
Level: Intermediate
PDF: A4 and Letter (2328 KB | 34 pages)Get Adobe® Reader®

Activity: 51607 views
Comments:

Summary

In this tutorial, you've looked at the methods available for debugging Perl scripts. You started by looking at the methods used in traditional Perl development environments. In general, these involve the use of either the print() function and monitoring the output or the use of the standard debugger provided with Perl. Both methods have limitations.

Using EPIC, the Perl development environment plug-in for Eclipse, you can debug Perl scripts and Perl CGI applications. You gain all of the functionality you might expect in a debugger, including step-by-step processing, variable monitoring and the ability to set breakpoints and monitor the execution of the script. You can also debug CGI scripts through Eclipse/EPIC through a proxy functionality that runs the scripts in Eclipse while providing the output from the script direct to a Web browser, including the built-in Web browser provided within Eclipse. Finally, you can also debug regular expressions, within a script and on an ad-hoc basis during development.

You can see from the functionality provided by EPIC detailed in this tutorial, and from the functionality you examined in the "Build Perl applications with Eclipse" tutorial, that the plug-in provides a complete environment for developing and testing Perl applications from within Eclipse.