tools

JDKMon 17.0.17 Released

Point JDKMon to the folder where all your JavaFX SDK’s are installed and it will check if there are any updates available.

Get Your JDK As Easily As Possible!

Have you ever been in the situation where you’ve been looking for a specific JDK version of a specific distribution?

Sometimes that was easy… sometimes it was hard… but it never was fun.

After creating the Disco API (“Universal OpenJDK Discovery API”, in full) which serves up JDK distributions as a service, I had the idea to create plugins for IDEs to enable people to download the JDK of their choice more easily.

JDKMon: Your Friendly JDK Distribution Updater

JDKMon is just a little tool that scans your computer for installed OpenJDK distributions and uses the Disco API to check whether there are updates available for one of the distributions.

In case it finds updates it will present you buttons for each package it finds.

When you click on one of these buttons (e.g. tar.gz, zip, pkg etc.) you have to select a folder where the selected package should be downloaded to.

Troubleshooting Java Processes Running on Your Machine

When your application has some problem, the first thing to check is running processes on the machine.

For Linux OS we generally use ps -ef. ps is one of the most used Linux troubleshooting commands. The JDK provides similar functionality for Java processes through jps. The jps command-line utility provides a list of all running Java processes on a machine for which the user has access rights. The access rights are determined by access-control mechanisms specific to the operating system.

Debugging Java on the Command Line

Some bugs are hard to replicate on your personal computer but easily replicated on production or test machines. It is a common situation that professional Java developers deal with frequently. To debug such problems, OpenJDK provides two tools, remote debugging and jdb.

This article focuses on jdb.

For Java applications, typical production and test machines are Linux servers without display managers, so that only command line tools are available. Here we cannot use professional IDEs like IntelliJ IDEA, Eclipse, or Apache NetBeans IDE.

In such scenarios, we can use jdb. jdb is a command line debugger and it is part of the OpenJDK.