Even Java systems can be "legacy" systems. This article explores 8 quick and relatively low risk ways to improve even the crustiest Java application. Applications that may have previously been written off as dead can find new life by using these tips to improve performance, reduce operations overhead and grease the gears of the development lifecycle.
Anil Hemrajani relates Agile practices to Java and several open source toolsets (Spring, Hibernate, Eclipse) designed to make Java development simpler. It's a high level overview of some free technologies used in web app development. Matt Morton liked this book, recommending it to technical managers and intermediate developers in small Java web development shops.
In this interview from SpringOne 2009, Javier Soltero discusses the challenges of managing a complex Java application, the Hyperic toolset, out-of-the-box versus developer-built application management/monitoring hooks, the effect of both the SpringSource and the VMWare acquisition on Hyperic development, and the result of combining SpringSource and VMWare's offerings.
OpenCore, a lightweight Java application performance monitor by JINSPIRED, released version 6.0 this month. InfoQ reviews what lightweight monitoring is and some of the terms and concepts involved
JMX has been around for quite some time and now it's gone Groovy. Find out what one developer is doing to provide an easy to use Groovy Builder for exposing your beans.
A port of the popular code coverage tool rcov is now available for JRuby. Ola Bini started a Hibernate-based library for persisting Ruby objects named Ribs. And finally, JRuby trunk contains a new MBean for analysing parse times.
Orbitz Worldwide, a leading global online travel company, has open sourced two monitoring tools Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) and Graphite, a persistence and visualization component. ERMA is a home grown Java API and library that has been used in several web applications at Orbitz to capture monitoring statistics in the applications at run-time.
Monitoring JVMs just became easier with jmx4r, a library that allows to easily access JMX MBeans with JRuby. If used from jirb, the interactive Ruby shell, this even allows to automate bulk changes or queries.
Matt Morton asked the question "Can Java be as Agile as the Dynamics (Ruby, Python, Groovy)?" and went to Anil Hemrajani's book to find out. He found a readable, useful book, and helps idenfity the right audience for this book.
