Forward to the Past…and Back to the Future
If you're a software developer and never use a debugger, please just go away. You'll probably be telling me about your Nobel Prize next, and I've got all the inferiority complex I can handle right now.

Now, for the rest of us who thrill to the chase, imagine that you're hot on the trail of a thorny bug in your Java program. You've been carefully breakpointing and single-stepping for two hours, zeroing in on the exact spot at which that annoyingly intermittent bug breaks cover.

Except for one tiny problem. The corrupt value in the variable you've been tracking is just a symptom of another problem, which probably appeared about two breakpoints ago. Start another two-hour, painstaking session … and reach for the Tums.

VisiComp doesn't claim that their RetroVue debugger will save your stomach lining, but it sure couldn't hurt. They've put in a real forehead-slapper: a journaling feature that records everything your program does, so that you can examine its entire state at any instant (or sit there and watch it changing). Even better, you can run time backward and forward to replay a bug's genesis, or examine the entire state of the program at a given point—"including threads, locks, invocation frames, objects, references, variables and so on," says Ronald Hughes, VisiComp's CEO. Contact VisiComp for pricing.

--Rick Wayne, Software Development Magazine