Covert Java™: Techniques for Decompiling, Patching, and Reverse Engineering

Chapter 6. Using Effective Tracing

	“A complex system that does not work is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that works just fine.”
	--Murphy's Technology Laws

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Introduction to Tracing 63

• Tracing As an Effective Method of Learning the Software 65

• Tracing and Logging Tools and APIs 65

• Tracing Do's and Don'ts 66

• Quick Quiz 67

• In Brief 68

Introduction to Tracing

Tracing is writing debug messages to an output stream during the execution of an application. It provides a recorded track of operations performed by the running application in real time. Tracing does not require the application to be running in debug mode. Also, because the trace messages are typically written to a log file, tracing provides information for studying ...