Sunday, November 10, 2013

How to debug your applications built by custom ant builds in Intelij Idea

Sometimes things which looks very minor end up taking more time than expected. My transition to Intelij idea from eclipse was pretty smooth with an exception to debugging. In the good old days I was using tomcat as server and eclipse as IDE. Just with a tomcat plugin for eclipse I was able to debug my code. 
Expecting the same and reluctant to use the ant auto generated by intelij idea I wrote my own ant build and wrote some code.After the sweet message "build successful", I deployed it on jboss. Tried to debug the code by placing a break point which to my surprise never reached. After many long hours of experimenting I added debug attribute and turned it on in javac ant task and bingo!!! debug point reached. Hope this saves your time!!!
Happy debugging!!! :)