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20080325 Tuesday March 25, 2008

At OpenSource Mela

I gave a short demo to our internal Sun guys on NetBeans DTrace plug-in showing them a sample PHP app. and how to identify some performance bottlenecks. Here is a pic.



I'm the hostile guy in the picture (second from right). Thank you Vasanth for the pic.

( Mar 25 2008, 04:28:41 AM PDT ) Permalink
20080324 Monday March 24, 2008

GUI based Package Manager for OpenSolaris

Have you checked out OpenSolaris Developer Preview 2? If not, download the 1 CD installer and try it out. If you are data-phobic like me, try out OpenSolaris from VirtualBox, a safe type 2 hypervisor.

I tried running OpenSolaris Developer Preview2 as a guest OS from my SXDE /08. It was amazingly fast. My only issue was with the VirtualBox's simulated nic. Due to some licensing issues the pcn driver will not work. But you can get the ae driver as explained by an excellent entry from Alan here.



For managing packages in OpenSolaris you can use the pkg tools or try out the new GUI based package manager that gives you a true Ubuntu experience when it comes to managing packages. Well almost. This piece of software is fully functional and you can test it now before the actual release.

Here are some quick steps to get you started using this GUI in OpenSolaris:
  1. Get SVN - pkg install SUNWsvn
  2. Get the source tree -
    svn co svn+ssh://anon@svn.opensolaris.org/svn/jds/ipsgui ipsgui
  3. Run make and make install under ipsgui sub folder.
  4. Install Packages - Go to ips-gui/packages/ and run
    pkgadd -d . SUNWipkg-gui SUNWipkg-gui-data (Accept the defaults).
  5. Execute packagemanager.
Here is the screenshot.



I became little more adventurous and installed Apache Web Server through this tool.





Try this neat tool today!

( Mar 24 2008, 07:39:07 AM PDT ) Permalink
20080306 Thursday March 06, 2008

Tracing PHP Function Call Time Using DTrace

In NetBeans, you can use the DTrace plug-in to analyze the performance of your PHP applications. A DTrace provider for PHP that adds probes to function entry and exit points has been available through Cool Stack. The support is also provided through Web Stack, if you are using SXDE 1/08.

To get started, follow these tutorials:
1.Configure NetBeans for DTrace.
2.Get PHP DTrace Extension.

Once you are done with the steps provided in the above articles, start your Apache web server and check the probes.

bash-3.2# dtrace -l | grep php

17952    php1895         dtrace.so       php_dtrace_execute function-entry
17953    php1895         dtrace.so       php_dtrace_execute_internal function-entry
17954    php1895         dtrace.so       php_dtrace_execute function-return
17955    php1895         dtrace.so       php_dtrace_execute_internal function-return
17956    php1896         dtrace.so       php_dtrace_execute function-entry
......
......

I'm running a simple PHP application that has some function calls. Go to the DTrace window in the NetBeans IDE and start the 
php_flowtime.d
script.



Here is my output. The output shows which function is being invoked and the invoke time.



My example has only a few SOAP calls. If you have a complex application with DB calls, this script will be useful to analyze the performance bottlenecks in your application.

( Mar 06 2008, 02:46:31 AM PST ) Permalink
20080302 Sunday March 02, 2008

Using Netbeans on Solaris

In my experience with interacting with the community in the recent Hyd. tech days, I could find many instances wherein the community is clueless about Web development on Solaris OS. While I could show them some demos of the Web Stack components, I could not discuss a whole lot about the Web Stack project and NetBeans capabilities on Solaris.

So I have a short writeup posted in NetBeans Wiki, so you can get more information about getting started with NetBeans based web development on Solaris OS.

Read the tutorial

( Mar 02 2008, 09:51:41 PM PST ) Permalink