I just wanted to bring everyone's attention to JUnitPerf, a set of decorators for JUnit to provide a simple means to acquire timings, and do paced-threading. Essentially implementing bare-bones performance testing in the Junit framework.


Mike Clark is credited with this gem. No relation.
http://www.clarkware.com/cgi/blosxom/2003/

[textile]From the "GWT Product Overview":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/overview.html via the "GWT Homepage":http://code.google.com/webtoolkit/

Google Web Toolkit (GWT) is a Java development framework that lets you escape the matrix of technologies that make writing AJAX applications so difficult and error prone. With GWT, you can develop and debug AJAX applications in the Java language using the Java development tools of your choice. When you deploy your application to production, the GWT compiler to translates your Java application to browser-compliant JavaScript and HTML.

I have spent a lot of time playing around with graphics libraries and toolkits for integrating real-time graphs within my own testing and monitoring tools. It seems like there are many open source tools available in the world of performance testing and system monitoring. And lots of people roll their own tools in whatever programming language they are into... but many lack graphics capabilities.

Two of the toolkits/libraries I end up using often for my own homebrew test tools are: RRDTool , and JRobin.

from the RRDTool site:
"RRD is the Acronym for Round Robin Database. RRD is a system to store and display time-series data (i.e. network bandwidth, machine-room temperature, server load average). It stores the data in a very compact way that will not expand over time, and it can create beautiful graphs. It can be used via simple shell scripts or as a perl module."

So...
RRDTool is a really good back-end for storing time-series data; which is pretty much all we care about when we are doing performance testing. It has bindings for various scripting languages, or can be invoked from the command line. If you are developing tools that need a data repository and graphing capabilities, this provides you both. You create an RRD and then you begin inserting data values at regular intervals. You then call the graphing API to have a graph displayed. The cool thing about this data storage is its “round robin” nature. You define various time spans, and the granularity at which you want them stored. I fixed binary file is created, and this never grows in size over time. As you insert more data, it is inserted into each span. As results are collected, they are averaged and rolled into successive time spans. It makes a much more efficient system than using your own complex object structures, or a relational database, or file system storage.

You will probably recognize the graphs it creates, as RRDTool is integrated in many popular monitoring tools (it is Free/Open Source, GPL License). I have built many tools around RRDTool, and it is really a nice system.

If you are in the Java world, there is a very cool project named JRobin. JRobin is a clone of RRDTool in pure Java. So you can create RRD's directly from your Java code.. and all in memory if you want to!

Some days I pretend to be a Java programmer, so I had to build a tool using JRobin. As a proof of concept, I wrote a small network latency monitoring tool. It shows off some of JRobin's capabilities. It pings a host at a given interval and records the latency. A graph of the network latency is rendered in real-time onto a Swing panel.

Here is my network latency monitoring tool: NetPlot (includes Java source code, GPL Licensed)

The tool itself is just a trivial example, and really isn't the point. But you could easily adapt this code or create your own to develop real-time graphs of your own time-series data.

(hmm.. I wonder if I could hook this into JMeter? probably..)


(How freaking ironic?.. I've been using this thing for a while now, but I decided to check the JRobin web site while I'm writing this.. and the developer just ceased development of the project and turned over all related rights to OpenNMS. can someone reading this please take over JRobin maintenance? .. erm seriously)

-Corey Goldberg
www.goldb.org

[textile]I was asked the other day if I could speak on a topic around the theme of "Shifting Paradigms in Performance Modelling"...

One of the interesting things about agile projects that the architecture emerges and evolves (as opposed to being designed up-front).

So, how do you keep up? How can you model performance if you don't know what the architecture will look like far enough into the future to justify modelling? Do you need to?

[textile]From the "AutAT Website":http://boss.bekk.no/boss/autat/ ...

AutAT -- An Eclipse Plugin for Automatic Acceptance Testing of Web Applications AutAT * is an open source Eclipse plugin, * makes test driven development of web applications easier, * contains a rich graphical editor for specifying how web-sites should function, * is written using the Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework (GEF),

Way back in August I wrote a pictorial guide to creating a headless hello world eclipse plug-in, and then in December I tapped the power of my massive blog fanbase to shill for votes for my EclipseCon short talk proposal. Today I'm happy to report that our efforts were a success and to invite you, if you're going to be at EclipseCon, to stop by March 22nd at 4:15 (that's 16:15 for my international audience) and listen to the very exciting short talk "Hello World" as a Headless Eclipse Plug-in. I promise it will be worth all 9 minutes of your time.

Read the full blog entry

Java library to speed up the running of automated tests for projects that use toplink to access databases. It allows you to run the application in memory, rather than against a database.