Vijay Tatkar's Blog

IDE, D-light and DTrace GUI Features in Sun Studio Express 7/08
This blog entry focusses on some new functionality in the latest Sun Studio Express 7/08. There is more to follow; here, I'd like to focus on three aspects of this Express.

IDE
The IDE in this Sun Studio Express release is based on NetBeans IDE 6.1, and includes the following new features:

• The Include-Hierarchy window lets you inspect the hierarchy of source and header files
• The Type-Hierarchy window lets you inspect all supertypes and subtypes of a class
• A new toolbar button lets you toggle between corresponding source and header files
• Code completion now works for #include directives
• A new Go to Type menu item lets you find a type (class, struct, enum, or typedef) by its name or prefix
• A new Go to Include menu item lets you go directly to a file that is included in a source or header file
• A new Go to Function or Variable menu item lets you find a function or variable by its name or prefix
• Project dependencies can be created for projects from existing code
• A choice of formatting styles for your source code
• A new Threads window shows you all the threads in the current debugging session
• A new Disassembler window displays the assembly instructions for the current source file
• A new Usages window shows you everywhere a class (structure), function, variable, macro, or file is used in your project's source code

sunstudio Command Options changes:
The following changes have been made to the options of the sunstudio command:

• The --enablejava and --disablejava options have been removed. You can now use the Plugin Manager (Tools > Plugins) to enable and disable the Java plugins.
• The format of the --ui-classpath path option, which appends the specified path to the IDE's classpath, has changed to --cp:apath.

D-Light Tool
The objective of the D-Light tool is to make sophisticated application and system profiling, more accessible for casual users. There are many tools that profile applications and there are other tool that profile the system stack, but there are few tools that can join these views into an easy to use interface. For the first time, you can optimize your application and system environment by visualizing performance bottlenecks and resource contention up and down the application system stack.
Using an intuitive drag and drop interface, the D-Light tool provides an extensible library of instruments that represent the latest advances of profiling technology, including Solaris Dynamic Tracing (DTrace). With instruments like CPU accountant and Sampler, developers can use the interactive GUI to quickly profile and peer into the runtime behavior of their applications.
For more information on using the D-Light tool, refer to the Project D-Light Tutorial .
The D-Light Tool now premieres on Linux platforms with two instruments, including a Clock Profiler. Its just the start of a more meaningful offering on Linux (and a nod to building instruments other than those based on DTrace.

DTrace GUI Plug-in
The NetBeans DTrace GUI plug-in is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for running DTrace scripts, even those that are embedded in shell scripts. In fact, the DTrace GUI plug-in runs all of the scripts that are packaged in the DTraceToolkit. The DTraceToolkit is a collection of useful documented scripts developed by the OpenSolaris DTrace community.
In its own manner, DTrace GUI Plug-in has proved to be a popular tool in the NetBeans inventory, with many thousands (indeed 10's of thousands) of downloads.
For documentation for the 0.2 version of the plugin that is included in this Express release, see http://www.netbeans.org/kb/60/ide/NetBeans_DTrace_GUI_Plugin.html
The 0.4 version of the plugin, which includes the Chime graphical tool for visualizing DTrace aggregations, is now available for download from the NetBeans Plugin Portal. To download and install this version, choose Tools->Plugins in the Sun Studio IDE, and select DTrace from the Available Plugins list.

Posted by tatkar ( Aug 01 2008, 09:48:50 AM PDT ) Permalink Comments [0]