Armonk, NY. New capabilities from IBM for its cloud platform, Bluemix, make it faster and easier for developers to debug applications in a cloud environment using popular open source utilities like node-inspector and tty.js.

These types of open-source utilities are widely used by developers on their local machines, but connecting a debugging tool or other utility in a cloud environment can be challenging and time-consuming. Based on a solution developed by IBM software engineers seeking to debug Node.js applications in Bluemix, this capability is now available to developers through the definition of a single Bluemix variable and a re-staging of the application. Developers can access a full description of this capability and how-to instructions in the Bluemix Developers Community blog.

This feature is part of App Management, a set of development and debugging utilities that can be enabled for Liberty and Node.js applications on Bluemix.

IBM launched Bluemix with a $1 billion investment in 2014, and has grown rapidly to become the largest public cloud-foundry deployment in the world. The open-standards-based Bluemix catalog includes over 120 tools and services spanning categories of big data, mobile, Watson, analytics, integration, DevOps, security, and Internet of Things. IBM Bluemix was recently shown to the “developers choice” of PaaS and is growing 10 times faster than the overall PaaS market according to research firm ESG.