Patent ID: 6912708

Claim:
A method to facilitate debugging a platform-independent virtual machine, comprising: providing an agent on the platform-independent virtual machine, wherein the agent provides a set of functions for accessing a plurality of variables in the platform-independent virtual machine and wherein the agent is limited to gathering a current state of variables within the platform-independent virtual machine, whereby limiting the agent to gathering the current state of variables within the platform-independent virtual machine allows the method to operate on a system with limited memory; adapting the platform-independent virtual machine to call the set of functions within the agent; examining a current state of the plurality of variables in the platform-independent virtual machine using the agent; and communicating the current state of the plurality of variables to a host machine, wherein an operator of the host machine can analyze the current state of the plurality of variables to determine if the platform-independent virtual machine is operating correctly and, if not, to determine a possible cause of incorrect operation.