Debugging Applets

In the Exceptions Trail of the Java Tutorial, the catch Blocks lesson gives the following as an example of a catch block:

} catch (IOException e) {
   System.err.println("Caught IOException: "
                      + e.getMessage());
}

This works fine if you are running an app from the command line, or even an applet using appletviewer, but it is absolutely useless if you are testing an applet in an ordinary browser.

My applet is supposed to record performance data, and I found it frustrating not knowing whether it had actually written anything to the database without running a separate query on the database. I therefore added a GUI object to the applet to display the message:

  if(dbDEBUG) {
 jTADiagnosics = new JTextArea();
 jTADiagnosics.setFont(new Font("Arial", Font.PLAIN, 14));
 jTADiagnosics.setColumns(60);
 jTADiagnosics.setRows(2);
 c.insets = new Insets(0,10,10,10);  //12oc,9oc,6oc,3oc padding
 c.gridx = 0;       //aligned with button 2
 c.gridy = 8;       //eighth row
 c.gridwidth = 3;   //3 columns wide
 add(jTADiagnosics, c);
  }

and a method to display errors in this text area:

   private void addItem(String newWord) {
    if(dbDEBUG) {
  System.out.println(newWord);
  jTADiagnosics.append(newWord);
    }
  }

Then for the reasons explained in my previous blog, the arguments passed to this method are the return values of the method used to do the data related stuff - loading the driver, making the connection, and most importantly, adding lines to the database.

On reflection, I think I have written these two blogs back to front, and the last one should have come before this one, but who cares? My intention now is to leave coding for a while and get back to Rasch theory.