At one point or another, every technology user has experienced an application crash.

In many cases trying to determine the exact cause of the crash can be as frustrating as the crash itself. Identifying the causality for crashes is a critical aspect of fixing the crash condition and making sure it doesn't re-occur.

That's where Google's open source Airbag project comes in. According to Google, Airbag is a set of client and server components that implements a crash-reporting system.

Airbag is made up of client-side libraries, a server-side processor library and build tools. In a discussion-list posting, Google Software Engineer Mark Mentovai explained that the client-side libraries generate dumps and assist in sending them to a crash server.

The server-side process library in turn reads the crash dumps and transforms them into information that is useful for debugging. The build tools are able to make sense of native debugging information, turning the data into a format that is understandable by the processor.

Currently the airbag project has no formal milestone releases on its Google Code page. That's not to say it doesn't have any users, or downloadable components for that matter. Developers can pull airbag components from the project's Subversion (SVN) source control code repository.

Full article: internetnews.com