Debugging

hyphenType will, by default, hide all internal problems it will find. This behavior is designed to prevent the end user from seeing incomprehensible messages in the console. For instance, an end user may not understand what a Java stack trace means.

But during the development phase of a piece of software, it is likely that the developers want to see what is actually going on inside of hyphenType in order to remove bugs, or even find points of improvements for hyphenType. Then how to balance those two things?

Our solution is to allow a user to turn on the messages by setting the environment variable org.hyphenType.debug.debug-mode to "true". Also, debug mode can be turned on by calling org.hyphenType.debug.HTLogger.setDebugMode(true). The following illustrates the former:

java -Dorg.hyphenType.debug.debug-mode=true MyApp

The default print stream used is System.out and this print stream can be replaced by calling the org.hyphenType.debug.HTLogger.setOutput(PrintStream newPrintStream) method.

Although it is advisable that to use a more sophisticated log tool such as Log4J, it is possible to use org.hyphenType.debug.HTLogger.log(String message) for simple logging.

org.hyphenType.debug.HTLogger.log(String message) does reflection in order to find out what is the caller class and method, which makes this method extremely slow.

We did not opt for using another more advanced log utility to avoid adding a dependency in hyphenType.