One Minute Distraction

About 2 months ago, I was chatting with one of the SE here in Singapore. We were talking about the state of Sun's developer tools offering and NetBeans came up. One of the thing that he lament was that there is no load generator for NetBeans. My foray into scripting and Jackpot was coming to an end and I wanted another project to sink my teeth into. I asked him what are some of Sun's customers and partners are using for load generation. A few names came up; JMeter was one of these names. He said that JMeter is quite popular as it is free. So I decided to see if it was possible to add JMeter into NetBeans.

I've never used JMeter. I started trying it out. As luck would have it, there was a series of articles that was published at that time so that helped me a bit. About 2 weeks ago, NetBeans 6 M2 was released. Lo and behold, JMeter is now supported in NetBeans as part of the profiler (see here). I was thinking of stopping my work; however I found that JMeter is only supported as an external tool. I wanted the entire JMeter to be inside NetBeans. So I continued.

So here is my first attempt at integrating JMeter into NetBeans. Here are some requirements:

• The module does not bundle JMeter. You have to first install JMeter. The version that I'm working with is version 2.2. You can get it here

• Now install the nbm for JMeter. The nbm is only tested with NetBeans 5. You must also install the beta for Matisse.

• After you have installed the module, go to Option -> JMeter and configure the JMeter installation directory

• Now create a project. Select File -> JMeter to create a new test plan. I've also bundled all the demo test plan from JMeter under File -> JMeter -> Sample Templates

Here is a screenshot of the integration

Click to enlarge.

So what can you do? Well, you can only edit the test plan and browse the help docs. To access the function docs, click on the question mark '?' under the test plan tree. This will open the functin helper in the output area. If you now click on 'Help', the JMeter docs will open in the editor area. Note that you have to set your the -Xms and -Xmx in netbeans.conf to be above 256mb. Otherwise you will get out of heap space exception.

The servers are not integrated yet. Hopefully this will happen in the next release.

Let me know what you think.