[Helma-dev] Important fix, visual debugger

[Hannes Wallnoefer]

Two big changes today (of course these things always happen the day
_after_ a release...)

First, I fixed a very serious bug that randomly messes up responses on
busy multiprocessor machines. The problem was caused by the reqtype
field in helma.framwork.core.RequestEvaluator _not_ being declared as
volatile, which caused read errors between the web thread and the
worker thread. If you are using a recent Helma snapshot on a
production server *with more than one CPU* you definitely want this
bug fixed.

Second, I added support for the visual Rhino debugger to Helma. This
is one of these why-haven't-I-done-this-before things, considered how
easy it was. Just add rhino.debug = true to your app.properties file
and restart. The debugger works like a charm, you can set breakpoints,
evaluate properties or even random code...  The only bad thing is
window/code management (at least with an average Helma application
:-). I think that could be fixed pretty easily by adding a tree pane
containing all open files. And you'll probably want to set
requestTimeout way to avoid being kicked out of your debugging session
by a TimeoutException!

I think these two items are reason enough for a new 1.4.3 release.
Expect it to be out on monday.

For those buiding from CVS: The changes are in both CVS HEAD and
helma_1_4 branch. If you build from CVS for production use, make sure
you use helma_1_4 branch. Otherwise, you'll get the repository code,
which is fine if you want to test it, but is not recommended for
production use yet.

Hannes