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Sunday July 18, 2004
My favorite JavaOne lab

Now that JavaOne is over I'll be blogging on a slower, but more consistent, pace.

JavaOne, of course, was filled with all kinds of forward looking ideas about Java. It's easy to get excited about all of the cool new stuff coming out: Java 5.0 is going to be an amazing new release of Java, Groovy has the potential to take Java/scripting integration to the next level, and I'm really happy to see Doug Lea's concurrency utilities added to Java as JSR 166.

But as JavaOne was winding down, I started thinking about what can I do today with what I had learned at JavaOne. Java 5.0 isn't even production yet, let alone integrated into a J2EE server release. We probably won't be seeing production server side Java 5.0 applications until this time next year. And while Groovy is cool, its syntax is still evolving rapidly. It is self-admittedly not ready for production use.

But then I started thinking about my favorite lab from the self-paced labs I was proctoring. The lab was basically a tour of using visualgc to tune the garbage collection characteristics the Java2D demo application. visualgc is a monitoring tool that hooks into the jvmstat tools. Here is a screenshot, courtesy of Moazam Raja:Not only is visualgc cool, but lab showed how practical it is. I've always thought of visualgc as primarily a teaching tool: letting people new to generational garbage collection see what is going on during GC. But this lab showed me how much easier visualgc makes spotting problems in the garbage collection settings.

As a result I've installed not only jvmstat and visualgc on my development box, but also the gcPortal application. Garbage collection is only a tiny piece of overall performance tuning, but these tools are interesting ways to get deeper insight into what is going on inside the JVM.

(2004-07-18 22:12:42.0) Permalink Comments [2]


Comments:

+1. As a lab proctor myself, this one is at the top of my list. I haven't gone through all of the labs, but of the ~6 or 7 I did go through, I found this one simple yet powerful.

Posted by John Clingan on July 19, 2004 at 06:42 AM PDT #

Very cool; I've been looking for a tool like this for a while. One snag I ran into though: the launcher shell scripts don't work in cygwin environments (`uname -s` = "CYGWIN_NT-5.0", $SHELL = "/bin/bash").

Posted by Andrew Taylor on July 19, 2004 at 10:06 AM PDT #

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