Debugging and Running JVM COBOL Applications in Containers

This section of the documentation presents detailed information describing how you debug your JVM COBOL applications that are running in containers.

Note:
  • This topic only applies to using JVM COBOL applications in containers. To use native COBOL applications in containers you need to use the functionality described in Debugging and Running Native COBOL Applications in Containers.
  • Most of the debugging functionality described in this section is provided through the Eclipse IDE, and as such is available in Visual COBOLfor Eclipse but not in Micro Focus Visual COBOL Development Hub when it is being used as a stand-alone development environment. Where a feature in this section is not available in Micro Focus Visual COBOL Development Hub when it is being used as a stand-alone development environment, that is indicated in the description of the feature.

To debug a containerized COBOL application you use Visual COBOL's remote debugging features. Remote debugging is not a technique specifically for containerized COBOL applications, and information on remote debugging in general is covered elsewhere in this documentation. See Debugging Using a Remote Machine for more information.

This section of the documentation covers information on remote debugging that is specifically related to containerized COBOL applications.

As described in Key Concepts When Using Containers for COBOL Application Development, there are two ways in which you can debug a COBOL application running in a container:

This section of the documentation assumes that you are using the first of these approaches, although the majority of the steps involved are the same for both approaches.

The process for debugging a COBOL application running in a container is as follows:

  1. Build the application (for debug) on the host computer using Visual COBOL.
  2. Run the Visual COBOL base image, making sure that you volume mount the directory containing the application's executable and debug files that you built in step 1.
  3. Find out the ID or IP address of the container.
  4. Start debugging remotely as you would normally (in a non-containerized environment), specifying the ID or IP address of the container to establish a connection between the debugger and the containerized application.

The following sections contain more information on each of these steps.