Saturday April 23, 2005 Envy. Pure Envy
Here's a lucky guy... I sure hope I'll get mine soon.Fred
( Apr 23 2005, 08:15:41 PM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Tuesday April 19, 2005 Remote App Profiling In Netbeans 4.1
There is a lot of focus right now on performance and load testing on the project that I'm working on right now. As a result, there are a lot of discussions on how best run tests, which tools to use, whether to instrument the code manually or use profilers to analyze the code. Since I needed to get results right away, I decided not to wait and try the Netbeans Profiler.The profiler originated from a Sun Labs project called JFluid. It's a very interesting, relatively low impact profiling tool, and I encourage people to go have a look at it.
The most interesting feature for me is the ability to profile an application running on a remote web server. In this case, I have my web application running in on my development server, and I am running the GUI within the Netbeans 4.1 Beta IDE.
The docs have a lot of details on how to get this running. There is a twist that gave me some difficulties though. The documentation tells you to run this calibrate.sh script on the machine hosting the application to be profiled. What they do not tell you is that you need to run this script as the user that will be running the application that will be profiled. If you are running the Sun Java System Web Server 6.1 (which is part of the Sun Java Enterprise System) that would be webservd by default.
-- Fred
( Apr 19 2005, 09:54:30 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
"On Fedex Vehicle For Delivery"
These are some of the most beautiful words in the English dictionary. Too bad it's only for the first half of my recent order on apple.com. Still, I should be receiving iLife '05 today.Still no update change on Tiger though. It now shows "Shipping on or before 4/29/2005".
Patience is a virtue, as my dear wife is fond of reminding me :)
-- Fred
( Apr 19 2005, 09:51:28 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Friday April 15, 2005 My First Aspect
It is interesting how the prospect of instrumenting n classes with m methods is a very convincing incentive to figure out how to use Aspect Oriented Programming.So I embarqued into creating an aspect and weaving it into the build of the Project That I Can't Really Talk About in order to gather some profiling information. It is essentially the aspect that you see listed so many times on "Intro to AOP" articles, except tweaked for the project's context and the profiling requirements.
The end result is not too bad. Getting this to work wasn't too painful, and it was certainly a lot less efforts than hunting for all of the instrumentation points within the app. I think I might pickup that book on AspectJ that I have sitting on a shelf.
-- Fred
( Apr 15 2005, 11:54:50 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Thursday April 14, 2005 Getting My Stripes
I just pre-ordered Mac OS X 1.4 (aka Tiger) and iLife '05 from Apple's web site this morning. I'm looking forward to install it on my PowerBook 15" (yep, the one that did survive a whole cup of coffee... It's still running great too :) ).I guess that makes me an early adopter :) .
-- Fred
( Apr 14 2005, 10:42:43 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]
Flying our Own Planes...
... Or in this case loggers.I thought I was clever by looking ahead and using the Jakarta Commons Logging component for my part of this Project That I Can't Really Talk About. The idea was to push the decision of which logger to use as far down the road as possible. It was integrating very nicely with the web server's logger (which is based on java.util.logging), so I wasn't too concerned about it.
But other people were concerned about it.
So, I went back and replaced all the commons logging calls with j.u.l calls. It was mostly tedious work since Commons Logging is designed to look like Log4J. The big difference were in level names and how to log an exception.
Thankfully, this was done with a good reason in mind since I'll be re-using a performance logger from a different sub-team, which is also built on top of j.u.l. That's a welcome change from the usual "it's open source! We can't use open source unless it's reviewed by legal!" or "Just because."
Sigh.
-- Fred
( Apr 14 2005, 10:00:20 AM MDT ) Permalink Comments [0]