The Java VisualVM blogging contest results are in and the "VisualVM OSGi plugin" entry clearly caught my eye. Not simply because it's in the top three, but because this management of OSGi platforms via JMX in a tool shipping with the JDK (visualvm) works well with GlassFish v3. You'll find the documentation and downloads on the creator's page. Kiev Gama also documents how he built the plugin (a NetBeans plugin really) for visualvm in this blog entry.

This is a nice addition to the ability to use the Felix shell (telnet localhost 6666) and to the Felix web console. All tools let you observe the content and status of the 200+ OSGi bundles currently in GlassFish v3 as well as operate on their life-cycle. This visualvm plugin matches well the troubleshooting positioning of visualvm (you most likely don't need it for day-to-day development). Of course, this is not specific to GlassFish and Kiev mentions having tested this with Fuji.

Kiev Gama was born in Recife, Brazil and is a PhD Student in Computer Science at UJF-Grenoble, France. Not really a surprise when you know that Richard Hall (of Felix fame and now with the GlassFish Team) used to be part of that group.

There is a New VisualVM 1.1 Release (Screencast). The Release Notes describe the new features but also notice the expanded Plugin API, the integration with Eclipse and IntelliJ, the support for IBM's JVM (via JMX), these new CLI commands, and its use of NB 6.5 RCP. VisualVM has been part of Sun's JDK since JDK 6 Update 7; together with the above changes, this makes it a good platform for writing performance analysis tools (e.g. see news).

Thanks to Danny for the tip; also see other entries at TheAquarium tagged as See VisualVM

I wrote about VisualVM yesterday (entry) but I had missed Octavian's Introduction where he gives instructions on how to use VisualVM on MacOS X. As a reminder, to run the VisualVM client you need a recent JVM, so you will need to use the latest JVM from Apple, but the app can run in a variety of JVMs, remote or local to VisualVM. VisualVM can even save the data into a snapshot and process it offline.

Check Octavian's Note for details.

VisualVM 1.0 is Now Available! VisualVM is a GUI-based, extensible, monitoring and performance analysis tool that is the next generation to the older, mostly CLI-based, tools in Sun's JDK distribution. VisualVM is part of the latest JDK: JDK 6 Update 7 (DZone, OnTheRecord, download) but it can monitor older JVMs.

Plug-ins are key to the success of VisualVM. They can be loaded directly from the tool and the current list includes a JConsole Container Plugin (for backward compatiblity), and Plugins for GlassFish, BTrace and a Thread Dump Analyzer.

For more information check out:

• VisualVM home site, ScreenCast at JavaOne, Features.
• Plugins: web page, Docs.
• Overviews at InfoQ and DZone
• Overview/Intro Blogs: Octavian, Luis-Miguel
• Regular bloggers in the topic include Luis-Miguel and Geertjan

If JConsole was one of your reasons for moving to Java 5, you'll probably like VisualVM. This recent project is building on top of the NetBeans profiler technology (née JFluid) to provide a NetBeans Platform-powered standalone tool to monitor Java VMs. This tool strikes an interesting balance between monitoring, profiling, and troubleshooting tools. Some plugins such as the MBeans browser are already available from its update center.

VisualVM Milestone 1 is now available and it has support for some applications including GlassFish which means that profiling Java EE applications can happen quite fast by ignoring application server implementation code, with instrumenting only the user code. VisualVM does require Java 6 (Mac users, SoyLatte doesn't seem to save you this time).