Wednesday Oct 12, 2005

Today, I decided to start blogging about Dashboards used in Sun Java Studio Creator. Developing applications using Sun Java Studio Creator is like a Customer activity. I better understand the full picture, including dealing with performance issues, defects, seeing ways Creator can be improved, ... The Dashboards I develop are Web applications developed using Creator which help track product cycle progress through bug activity. These applications query Sun's Bug Tracking database using various constraints depending on the product area, Quality Criteria release constraints, date, etc. Over 10 applications have been developed and are running 24x7 using Sun Java Application Server 8.0 and 8.1. Those applications which take awhile to display the data because of all the queries or the application is accessed frequently by many users. For these applications, static html pages are generated. This helps reduce server load and give a quicker response.

The previous Bug Tracking system was running on aging hardware and occassionally would be unresponsive during heavy activity. During the 1.0 release of Creator, the Dashboards were querying this older Bug Tracking system and would go down at the wrong time or would take a long time to respond. Since the Dashboards are hosted on a Sun Application Server, the Dashboards make a good test case for the server. When making enhancements to an application and redeploying, the 8.0 server would run out of memory. These 2 issues were devastating to the Quality Council (group who monitors the Quality Criteria). To do away with the misery, Dashboy got busy. First the "out of memory" errors were communicated to the Sun Application Server team. Eventually fixes were made or backported and heap size was increased and now, in 8.0, memory issues are a thing of the past.
Here's the heap increases which were made to the jvm options of Sun App Server:

 -XX:NewRatio=2
 -XX:PermSize=32m
 -XX:MaxPermSize=128m
 -XX:+CMSPermGenSweepingEnabled




Quality Criteria is a metric or goal that the Creator team strives to reach. For example, all priority 1 (most serious defects) must be fixed before the product can be released. Another criteria is to fix, say, 300 priority 3 bugs for a release

There might be 4 Quality Criteria per release, depending on whether the release is an update or full release. For 2.0, there are 4.

On the main Quality Dashboard are several numbers which include the state of the Quality Criteria and links to the bug lists (Next blog, I'll start describing the design and architecture of Dashboards).
Also the Quality Dashboard has become a 1-stop shopping where there are links to most of the Dashboards and the Quality Criteria state for each of Creator's modules. One module is the Designer which is a WYSIWYG editor for designing a Web Page. Check out Sun Java Studio Creator if you haven't already. It's a lot of fun to use and it's useful for cooking up web sites.
Comments:

How about some screenshots of the dashboards? I suppose you could blur out any internal/sun-only details.

Posted by Moazam on October 12, 2005 at 10:06 PM PDT #

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