New NetBeans Profiler is add-on technology to open source NetBeans IDE 5 -- ADTmag

New NetBeans Profiler is add-on technology to open source NetBeans IDE 5

By ADT Staff
December 28, 2005

Sun Microsystems announced NetBeans Profiler Milestone 11, the latest release of its Java app profiler, and an add-on to the upcoming open-source NetBeans IDE release 5. App profilers provide information about the run-time behavior of apps. This version of NetBeans Profiler will help optimize the dev process by providing tighter run-time monitoring of CPU, memory and threads, in addition to new early access support for the Mac OS X, according to the company.

A collaboration between Sun's research arm and its open-source NetBeans software team, the Profiler is add-on technology to the NetBeans integrated development environment, which serves as the foundation of development tools for both the Java Enterprise System and Solaris Enterprise System. The NetBeans Profiler has been architected from the outset to deliver low-overhead profiling, tight integration with the Java platform, and support for profiling of all types of apps: desktop, Web and enterprise. In addition to early access support for Java profiling on Mac OS X, the latest release of the NetBeans Profiler provides continued support for Java Platform Standard Edition 5 apps running on the Solaris Operating System, Windows and Linux.

The NetBeans Profiler is based on profiling technology originally developed in Sun Laboratories. This technology uses dynamic bytecode instrumentation to allow for profiling with dramatically lower overhead, giving the ability to obtain results in situations where the use of other profilers becomes unpractical or impossible, according to Sun. Profiling an example application from the Java SE 5 JDK, the NetBeans Profiler imposed only 10 percent of the overhead of traditional Java profilers.

The NetBeans IDE has seen significant increases in user adoption over the last 18 months. Release 5 of the NetBeans IDE, scheduled for early 2006, will accelerate that trend by providing feature enhancements: code-aware developer collaboration, a visual GUI dev tool (Project Matisse), tools for developing mobile apps and the NetBeans Profiler. Adding the profiler to the mix of tools available to the developer in the NetBeans IDE enhances developer workflow, changing the model from edit/compile/test/debug to edit/compile/test/debug/profile, leading to more robust apps.