Japex 1.1 is now available!

It's been a while since the last time I blogged about Japex. Over the last year or so there have been many incremental improvements (resulting in 30 different releases) and with the recent addition of combined bar charts, I thought it was time to make this the official 1.1 release.

I won't talk about all the features that we have added during the last 12 months, instead I'll concentrate on the very latest one: support for combined bar charts. The output parameter japex.resultValue denotes the value produced by driver A on test case T. I.e., there is one value of japex.resultValue for each driver-test case combination. The unit of this value is defined by japex.resultUnit which by default it is set to TPS (transactions per second).

Since the introduction of scatter charts in Japex, a new value axis was added together with the output parameter japex.resultValueX. The "X" suffix in this parameter refers to the X axis in a scatter chart. This X axis is never computed by the Japex engine, but drivers are free to assign values to japex.resultValueX. If the main axis (or the Y axis) was used to calculate performance, say in TPS, this new axis could be used to calculate some other property such as message size, memory usage, etc. Even though these values would always be shown in HTML tables, they were only plotted if the type of chart selected was scatterchart.

Unfortunately, scatter charts are not the easiest charts to read at times. This is where combined bar charts are useful. Rather than explaining how one of these charts would look like, let me show you one generated using the FastInfoset sample that comes with Japex:

Note that in this chart values are normalized with respect to the JAXPDriver. The top part of the chart shows message sizes (relative to the XML message size) and the bottom part shows throughput.

Using these type of bar charts, it is now possible to simultaneously look at two different properties in the same chart and, as in the example above, find possible correlations between message size and throughput. The 1.1 release of Japex is now available for download. Happy benchmarking!