Gregg Sporar's Blog

June 2007 Archives

Ja, Jazoon

I attended the first three days of the first ever Jazoon conference. There were some rough edges, which is understable since this is their first year, but all in all it was okay. One of the best things about it was the venue: a movie theatre. I've always heard people talk about how great it is that JavaPolis is in a movie theatre and now I know why. There are two big advantages: the projected image on the screen is HUGE so everyone can see what the presenter is talking about and the chairs are soooooo nice and comfy.

As always, of course, the best part of these conferences is the people you talk to. As I mentioned in my entry about NetBeans Day Zurich, it was a great pleasure to meet Fabrizio Giudici. One of the presentations I did at Jazoon was on the NetBeans Profiler. It was essentially a slightly slimmed-down version of the JavaOne session that I did with Jiří Sedláček and Jaroslav Bachorík. Fabrizio was nice enough to write a blog entry about it.

William Louth posted a comment to Fabrizio's entry that started with: "Integration within an IDE is overrated and it is certainly not the fastest way to solve real world performance problems...." In his second paragraph he went on to state that "... the integration of the NetBeans Profiler, which by the way is a nice low level code profiling tool, into an IDE is only useful for unit (code blocks) profiling and not for application profiling unless we are talking about a desktop application."

I have a tremendous respect for William and would happily concede that he knows more about performance tuning and troubleshooting than I do (particularly on enterprise applications). And he seems like a nice enough guy - I chatted with him briefly after his session at TheServerSide Java Symposium in Las Vegas back in March. But I am not in complete agreement with his comments.

William is focusing on test and production environments and interestingly, I state in the presentation that one of the goals of integrating the profiler into the NetBeans IDE is to help developers find and fix performance problems before an application is moved into production. So I think William and I are in agreement there - this is a tool primarily for use in a development environment.

Further, the only production JDK you can attach the NetBeans profiler to on-the-fly without restarting the JVM is JDK 6, and not many folks are running JDK 6 in production yet. So I fully recognize the profiler's limitations there - it is much easier to stop and restart desktop applications than it is to do that with web/enterprise applications that have users connected! I would also agree with William's follow-up comment (in response to Wade Chandler's comment) that premature code optimization is not in anyone's interest. And finally, since the profiler is just looking at what is going on inside a single JVM, there is much information (particularly for an enterprise application) that it just cannot see.

I think there are two areas where I disagree with William. First, as he pointed out the profiler is "useful for unit (code block) profiling," which means to me that the benefits of having the profiling tools integrated is not overrated. In other words, to profile a block of my code what better way is there than to have my profiler integrated in so well that from within the editor I can simply pick a context menu entry and I'm all set. Further, with the NetBeans 6 profiler it is even easier to define blocks of code for profiling now that the profiling points feature has been added.

Second, I have worked on a non-trivial production web application where the memory profiling feature of the NetBeans profiler was invaluable. Memory leaks can quickly become performance issues. Admittedly, I was not allowed to connect to the production server (again, because of that whole restart issue), but the sysadmin set up a test box for me, gave me a duplicated environment and the appropriate load tests and I was able to find the problem after others had tried repeatedly with different tools. Admittedly, the integration of the profiling tools into an IDE was not what ended up making the main difference in this case - but integration certainly does not hurt. :-) Would that particular problem have been found more quickly with a tool from JInspired? I honestly do not know - but I tend to doubt it.

In the end, it boils down to the standard advice: pick the right tool for the job. While you are doing development, an integrated profiling tool can make a difference. After your application moves into production then things get more complicated. The NetBeans profiler might be able to help, but it depends upon the type of application and the type of problem that is occurring.

NetBeans Day Zurich

I like it when other people write blogs that I can refer to and save myself some time typing. :-)

Fabrizio Guidici and Felipe Gaucho have already posted excellent summaries of NetBeans Day Zurich which took place yesterday. Fabrizio's entry is here and Felipe's is here.

I won't go into the details of the agenda since they both cover it very well. What I enjoyed the most about the day was getting to meet members of the community. I had met Felipe at NetBeans Day San Francisco in May, but with all the activity and people there I did not get a chance to talk with him much. So it was good to chat with him.

I also enjoyed working with Fabrizio. I had installed his Blue Marine application on my laptop so that he could do a demo of it at the end of my session on the NetBeans Platform. I ran into a small bug with a context menu and he gave the fix for it right before the day got started.

It was also nice to meet Sven Reimers, who wrote a FindBugs plugin for the NetBeans IDE and is also the lead on the SQE project. And I got to meet Olivier Liechti, a professor from the University of Applied Sciences, Western Switzerland (HEIG-VD). Olivier and Patrik Fuhrer from the University of Fribourg are teaching a tutorial today on building rich client applications on the NetBeans Platform.

An important note: these events do not just "happen." A significant amount of work goes on behind the scenes to pull it together. My thanks to Julie Welch, Nicole Tanner, Peter Gassmann, and Karim Mazouni for making it happen.

Just a few photos below (click for full size) - Fabrizio and Felipe have additional photos on their blog entries.

	Julie Welch and Nicole Tanner
	The food line was popular, especially with Brian
	Attendees enjoying the beer bust

An Integrated Profiler

In NetBeans IDE 6 the profiler will no longer be a separate download and install - it is baked right in to the IDE. This is actually fairly old news - the first milestone build of NetBeans 6 that had this feature was Milestone 8, as Jiří Sedláček pointed out. But as usual, I am running behind on my blogging....

Jiří and I along with Jaroslav Bachorík did a technical session on integrated profiling tools at JavaOne earlier this year. Not surprisingly, we chose to use the NetBeans profiler for all our demos. The idea was to show that the advantages of an integrated profiler extend beyond just ease of installation and setup: you get better features too. For example, an easier way to choose which methods should be profiled.

If you missed our session at JavaOne you can download the presentation slides or even better, come to my session at Jazoon in Zurich. And if you happen to be in Zurich later this month, be sure to attend NetBeans Day Zurich. It is a free event, but you do have to register.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.