Wednesday 18 April 2012

Exciting Java Tools

I wanted to blog about some of the most exciting Java tools which I have come across. Sadly none of these tools are free but the technology which they implement is really impressive.


Chronon records a complete trace of the execution of a Java program. There are a couple of reasons why this is really cool.
Firstly, the actual logging mechanism is claimed to have a low enough impact that you could realistically run with Chronon all the time. The theory here is that when you hit a hard to reproduce bug you will always have enough information to investigate and fix the bug.
Secondly, Chronon have produced some excellent UI to get the most out of the collected trace files. The time travelling debugger allows you to step forwards and backwards through a trace file as if you were stepping through a live program. Even cooler is the post execution logging which allows the developer to add logging statements and have them be executed as if they were present when the trace file was captured. 


The Sun Hotspot JVM includes support for a cool feature called Hotswap. This allows the body of Java methods to be updated on the fly while the JVM is running. The feature is nice but limited as a lot of things are not allowed - methods can't be added or removed, method signatures can't be changed, fields can't be added or removed etc.
ZeroTurnaround have managed to produce a system which runs within the standard Hotspot JVM and removes all of these limitations. This is really cool!
This technology has been packaged in two ways. JRebel allows developers to work on applications and change the code without restarting the JVM. LiveRebel does the same but is aimed at live upgrade of webapps without downtime. 


Azul Systems have created a new garbage collector (C4) that claims to put an end to stop the world garbage collections. The promise is that this allows a single JVM to use 10s of GB of heap without having to endure periodic stop the world GCs that last several seconds.
The big side benefit of this work is that Azul have published lots of great information about the details of garbage collection.

One more thing

All the tools I have spoken about so far aren't free but there is one more tool which I should mention.
Eclipse is both free and excellent and is definitely the tool that makes the most difference to me every day that I work on Java code.