5

I noticed that there are two debug perspectives in Eclipse that is setup for Android development.

Why two?

What does the DDMS perspective provide that the Debug perspective doesn't provide?

To clarify, I am only interested in a diff kind of comparison table, not the full feature list of DDMS.

I am also curious to know why the folks who designed DDMS, didn't append it to the Debug perspective but rather chose to implement it as an independent perspective.

(I was on the DDMS perspective, trying to debug a problem by placing a breakpoint. When I ran the program, Eclipse asked me to switch to the Debug perspective. That was the point where I asked myself "why not add the DDMS functionality to the Debug perspective and avoid switching?)

Android Eve
  • 14,864
  • 26
  • 71
  • 96

2 Answers2

5

DDMS allows you to interact with the emulator doing things such as:

  • set location of phone, send gps coordinates, etc
  • view the heap and track memory allocations
  • profile methods and examine threads
  • logcat
  • spoof phone calls and sms messages
Robby Pond
  • 73,164
  • 16
  • 126
  • 119
4

DDMS perspective provides you a lot of information that debug perspective doesn´t. In ddms perspective you can wath Threads and the memory used for each thread, memory per application, see application and emulator heap, the allocation tracker (here you can step the asynchronous task i.e), the logcat are much more fine that debug console, and the most important function (to me) is the Method profiling, where i can follow step by step the actions performed by my application.

And i forgetting the emulator action simulator, simulate call, simulate locations, simulate sms, etc.etc...

Franco
  • 7,385
  • 3
  • 27
  • 22
  • Thanks and +1. What's confusing to me is that I was on the DDMS perspective, trying to debug a problem by placing a breakpoint. When I ran the program, Eclipse asked me to **switch** to the Debug perspective. That was the point where I asked myself "why not add the DDMS functionality to the Debug perspective and avoid switching? – Android Eve Feb 24 '11 at 13:48
  • oh, my mistake, i supposed that are differents perspectives cause functionality is quiet different, on debug p, we follow the application statement by statement to fix semantic or syntactic bugs. In the other hand with DDMS, we can follow the entire application behavior, the memory that consumes, the opened files, etc – Franco Feb 24 '11 at 13:58
  • I didn't notice any mistake in your answer. I am only trying to understand the differences. If you could elaborate on **how** the logcat is much finer than that in debug console this would be great. As far as I could tell, they look the same. – Android Eve Feb 24 '11 at 14:08
  • 1
    are we talking about perspectives or views? because logcat view is present in debug perspective and ddms perspective, but are the same view in both perspectives, there are no difference between the logcat view showed in debug or ddms perspective. Now, if we compare the 'logcat view' against the 'debug console' there are many differences – Franco Feb 24 '11 at 14:15
  • I was referring to **perspectives** only. – Android Eve Feb 24 '11 at 14:21