Compiling differently for debug and release

Question

I want to produce slightly different .class files for my debug and release compilations. For debug, methods like toString() should return rich information which should not be present in the release version. In fact, I want most of my debug specific code to not be included in the final release to keep ti's file size down.
I realise I can do this by creating something like
public interface MyGlobals {
    static final boolean DEBUG = false;
}and implementing this on any class that needs to do debug specific work. However, I'm in a bit of a chicken and egg scenerio. This file needs to exist during development time so that every class that needs it can implement it - however, this would prevent me from dynamically changing it based on whether I'm doing a debug or release build. On the other hand, if the file is generated automatically at compile time, all the classes that need to refer to it will need to refer to a non-existant source file, which will cause problems in my NetBeans IDE.
Is there a way around this? It would be nice if there was some sort of a configuration file you could specify to to alter how the code is generated. Something similar to C++ #ifdef.

Answer 1

I realise I can do this by creating something like
public interface MyGlobals {
static final boolean DEBUG = false;
/code]You should be careful about this, by the way, rember that this kind of constant value gets compiled in to classes that reference it, and java doesn't always pick up the need to recompile when the source of MyGlobals changes.
On the other hand, if you don't declare it final then the compiler can't optimise out code that you want it to exclude for you.