Ashish Patel

I have gotten my first tutorial on IBM DeveloperWorks published! The article is called “Build ARM performance monitoring in your applications“. Read it and feel free to comment This article/tutorial comes from a paper I submitted to the Computing Measurement Group (CMG) in Reno 2006.

The Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) project released an open source and Application Response Measurement (ARM) V4.0-compliant implementation in June 2006, based on TPTP V4.2. This tutorial describes the TPTP project and explains how ARM has been implemented and integrated with TPTP. The trade-offs involved in getting to this point are discussed, along with the challenges in moving forward. Specific examples show how to get started using ARM for your application with TPTP.

This tutorial describes how the Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) project is extending its toolset to use The Open Group Application Response Measurement (ARM) instrumentation methodology for response-time tracking. Starting with TPTP V4.2, performance analysts will be able to use Eclipse TPTP — or products based on TPTP technology — to identify and monitor individual transactions as they pass through the various components of composite applications. The implementation of ARM described here was released as a Technology Preview with TPTP V4.2 in June 2006. In the future, it will be fully integrated into TPTP.

admin Eclipse, IBM

Some of you may have heard about the Netbeans girls at EclipseCon 2006. I found out after the conference from a co-worker that a picture of the SWT Lead was seen taking a picture with the ladies and they made it into a splash screen for last week’s integration build of Eclipse.

Check out the “bug” here. Too bad its marked as WONTFIX

admin Eclipse

Its been a very busy few months, I can hardly believe March is almost over too!

The IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit (IPOT) team has been hard at work on a release, however, what good is hard work without a conference? We’re going to be giving a demonstration and a short talk on the toolkit at this year’s EclipseCon 2006 event. This will be the first time the toolkit is displayed here.

Our focus for the conference will be on how we utilize the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP). Unfortunately, you won’t find me at the conference because I’ll be in Toronto incubating another next-generate technology this week You’ll have to wait to find out what that is ….anywho, here is the abstract for the presentation one of my teammates will be giving:

The Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Project (TPTP) is an extensible framework for building advanced profiling and monitoring tools, and the IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit (IPOT) is one such tool. Leveraging the TPTP data collection framework, IPOT can help testers and developers determine the causes of performance problems in their J2EE applications, and is a powerful integration point where profiling data collected from various sources can merge into a single problem determination work flow. A step by step by demonstration will be given to illustrate the process of how users could detect performance degradations in their distributed applications, and then retroactively find out the possible causes by leveraging the capabilities provided by various tools in an integrated IPOT environment. The capability of collecting live trace and resource data will also be demonstrated, and TPTP, IBM Tivoli Composite Application Manager (ITCAM), IBM Tivoli Monitoring (ITM), and IBM Rational Performance Tester (RPT) will be used in this demonstration.

admin Eclipse

Yeah you heard me right! The “geeks” over at Playboy Enterprises Inc. thinks Eclipse (the open-source universal tools platform) is HOT and SEXY!

They say you learn something new everyday, but somethings are too good to be true? Not this time! The software developers who are employed by Playboy apparently love Open Source, and when I say that I mean not just Eclipse but a whole bunch of other projects too. Playboy Enterprises is signing up to add eclipse to its mirror site, which means at work I can legally go over to http://mirrors.playboy.com/ and not have the IT department call me…I’d probably be too chicken to try though! The Eclipse Foundation gave them the go ahead on the idea too.

I got a little curious after I read the article so I went over to the mirror site to see what they actually keep on the mirror site. They source such projects as Apache, FreeBSD, Fedora, mod_ssl, and Mozilla.

In the words of Paris Hilton, thats HOT!

admin Eclipse

This coming week is the week of the CASCON 2005 Conference in Markham, Ontario. It’s going to be held at the Sheraton Parkway Hotel (yes that hotel that we 2004 Extreme Bluers stayed at)!

I’ll be presenting a workshop on Tuesday October 18, 2005 on The Engineering of Autonomic Systems. This workshop is comprised of several 30 minute talks. I will be specifically talking about “Using and Extending the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) for Data Collection in Self-Healing Systems”. The abstract for this presentation reads:

This presentation describes how to use and extend the logging and monitoring tooling in the Eclipse Test and Performance Tools Platform (TPTP) for data collection in self-healing systems. TPTP is used to generate, collect and consolidate log, trace, statistical data from distributed applications necessary for self-healing systems. The presentation begins by exploring the motivation and history of the TPTP project. Next, an explanation of TPTP’s architecture will be provided with focus on the project’s extensibility and data collection components. Finally, a demonstration will illustrate the collection of log and statistical data from a sample distributed two-tier application in real-time.

During the workshop, we’ll be doing a demonstration of the current commercial release of the IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit (IPOT).

So what is CASCON all about?

CASCON 2005, the 15th annual international conference hosted by the IBM Centers for Advanced Studies, is the premiere computer science and software engineering conference in Canada. CASCON is an excellent venue for exchanging ideas, showcasing results, experiences and tools, and networking with researchers and practitioners from academia, industry, and government. The Meeting of Minds, as CASCON is otherwise known, is an opportunity to present, discuss, and learn.

CASCON 2005 comprises keynote presentations, technical paper tracks, Frontiers of Software Practice track, challenging workshops, Best Paper and Best Student Paper Awards, and a Technology Showcase, which is a key attraction of the conference. CASCON always aims to innovate. As well, the proceedings from CASCON 2005, as most of those from past CASCONs, will be included in the ACM Digital Library, a “window into the world’s core computing literature.” We invite you to participate in CASCON 2005 to help us build an exciting forum for exchanging ideas and experiences in these ever expanding and critical fields of software and computing.

Last year, I held a technology showcase called Symbiosis. This project ultimately fueled the development of what is now known as the IBM Performance Optimization Toolkit (IPOT). From the CASCON 2004 archives, the following is the abstract for the Symbiosis project:

Symbiosis is research project aimed at creating a collection infrastructure for sharing data between run-time monitoring systems and developer run-time analysis tools. The intent of this project is to provide a problem determination tool that helps to complete the software life cycle by bridging the gap between the developer, the tester, and the system administrator in any typical software development organization.

If your in town, and if your registered , come check it out!

admin Eclipse, IBM

I haven’t used the Eclipse Visual Editor (VE) project for some time until last night. Some of their latest release work has brought a lot of simplicty to how GUI’s are built today, especially with the Grid Control. I would think its just as simple as MS Visual Studio, if not better in some ways, now.

Ed Burnette recently posted a column on his blog that mentioned:

You’ve probably heard about Matisse, the GUI builder being developed for NetBeans 4.2. It’s similar to a little-known but innovative GUI designer called Foam in the way it makes GUI design much easier. Not to be outdone, Eclipse is getting similar features, beginning with version 1.1 of the Eclipse Visual Editor and continuing in 1.2 and beyond. You can see a preview in this oh-so-smooth screencast narrated by Gili Mendel. For more information see bug 101936 and this posting by Joe Winchester.

I took a look at Foam and it again adds some simplicity to GUI design and the concept of drag n’ drop. I’m very curious to see what the VE project can bring after a couple releases of stability and feature cycles (say version 2.0 or 3.0) – should be interesting!

Take a look at the latest Eclipse VE demo here.

admin Eclipse

This week Eclipse 3.1 was released and the Eclipse Foundation reached 100 members. The 3.x version stream of Eclipse has been the most popular edition of Eclipse to-date, and in my opinion, it brings a lot of advancements to a universal tooling platform.

For those not aware, I have been working with Eclipse before version 2.0. I started out reporting bugs and developing J2EE applications. Last year I worked on a commercial IBM product from which I was able to being bug reporting and drive requirements to what is now known as TPTP (or Hyades). During my last semester of Computer Engineering, at the University of Alberta, I worked on creating embedded debugging capbilities for the Motorola HC12 family. Recently, I’ve been exploring the Eclipse Rich Client Platform.

I have to start off by clarifying one important thing. When I mention Eclipse to people they only are aware of it as being an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that is used for Java programming. News flash people, yes it’s an IDE, but more importantly its a “universal tools platform“. What does this mean in plain english? For software developers and businesses it provides a foundation or framework for building applications that includes a visual component, such as the standard widget toolkit (SWT). You can build any application using the Eclipse Platform. There have been things from biological sciences applications, news aggregators, e-mail clients, all the way to stock management solutions created using the Eclipse Project.

Some people harp on the fact that its written and executes on Java. However, when you show someone who’s used tradition Java UI’s, EMACS, and/or Visual Studio people are really surprised at the performance of Eclipse. Eclipse uses SWT for its UI rendering, and I believe IBM has done significant work to optimize the UI. So its actually a great thing is that its Java underneath because you can get cross-platform support on any application you create. Now-a-days its important for this since Linux and Apple’s OS are widely popular and available.

What do you need to making your own Eclipse powered application? From a technical standpoint, you need pull the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) and develop your own plugins that provides the business rules and logic for your application. These plugins get placed into the RCP and when the RCP loads your plugins do too.

Anyways, back to the point…Eclipse 3.1 is released. I’ve taken it for a test drive already and found some visual changes (such as icons and splash screens) and numerous bug fixes that were apparent in version 3.0 and 3.0.1. To my knowledge, there isn’t any new major features in this release (as denoted by the 3.1 version number its just patching and minor adjustments for what is to come down the pipe).

admin Eclipse