Hot off the engineering presses from the OpenBD project is the new browser-based OpenBD debugger. The debugger is an OpenBD plugin so like all plugins, you simply drop a JAR file in your WEB-INF/lib directory and it’s installed. No arduous configuration, just drop the JAR into your project and you’re debugging. Best of all, it’s completely free.

The debugger has all the features you’d expect in a debugger, such as being able to set breakpoints, step over/step through, break on exceptions if you so choose, and the ability to inspect the state of all your variables while your code is running. Fantastic stuff. Watch the video to see how slick this is.

What I really love about the debugger, in addition to how dead simple it is to get up and running, is how familiar it will be to CFML developers. You don’t have to go digging around in tiny little Windows inside Eclipse to see what’s going on in your code, you see everything in a browser window, and the variable values look like CFDUMP output.

If you’ve been put off by the complexity of other debuggers in the past the OpenBD Debugger is WELL worth a look. Previously I was only using a debugger when I absolutely had to, but because it’s so amazingly easy to use, the OpenBD Debugger will become a regular part of my development process.

Go to the OpenBD download page and click on the “Official Plugins” tab to grab the debugger (and the latest nightly, since the debugger doesn’t work with the official 1.2 release) and give it a whirl. This is one of those tools that now that I’ve been using it for a bit, I can’t imagine developing without it.