Java Devs: Gear Up! (a Shout Out to adaptj and tda)

Found an awesome tool today that I never knew existed, and it blew my mind. It's called StackTrace, from adaptj. There's a free version you can launch using Java Webstart (JNLP). This thing is awesome at solving one small, but all too common problem: being unable to get a thread dump in a running JVM because you don't have the console that launched the java process. (Imagine someone on your QA team calls you up, and says that his nightly build of your app locked up - you ask him three questions: Did you start it with remote debugging enabled? no? Then did you enable log4j logging? no? Did you keep around the console that launched it? Ah, no again, of course. At this point you're usually screwed. But not anymore!)

It looks like this:

When you start up StackTrace, click the little gear icon or go to Process > Select... and you get a list of all the java processes on your system. Select the desired one, click OK, then back on the main screen hit the "Thread dump" button.

Boom. Instant thread dump of everything in that JVM instance. THIS. IS. HUGE.

Second little discovery of the day is called tda. It's a thread dump analyzer that will open up a saved stack trace and show you exactly which threads own which monitors, and speed up a bit your task of slogging through pages and pages of stack traces. Give it a try: