Spring Boot is a marvel of developer productivity. It hides the plumbing and gets you up and running fast. Components are “miraculously\u201d autowired, properties are \u201cmagically\u201d resolved, and database connections materialize seemingly without explicit configuration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But when something goes wrong, the magic becomes a mystery, and debugging becomes a deep dive into the framework’s internal mechanics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Regular debuggers handle plain Java classes and objects, lacking framework-specific context. To inspect a property, track a bean, or examine an entity state, you need to dig into the internals of Spring Boot. (Remember how to access the application context from the debugger evaluator? Neither do we.) Let\u2019s pull back the curtain on the Spring Boot magic and see how the Spring Debugger<\/a> plugin makes the invisible visible. <\/p>\n\n\n\n If you prefer watching and listening, have a look at Marco Behler’s recent session on Spring Debugger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rabbit was always in the hat \u2013 you just had to know where to look. IntelliJ IDEA has long allowed you to inspect loaded beans or trace the source of a property value using the debugger, but doing so wasn\u2019t exactly straightforward. Our goal is to change that \u2013 to make debugging Spring applications as comfortable and productive as the rest of your development experience in IntelliJ IDEA. The first step was an additional structure view<\/a>, and now we\u2019re going further. <\/p>\n\n\n\n