Chaotic Java

Since I didn’t see Anywhere around the NetBeans site about RC 2 except their main page, I don’t see what the fuss is all about. What’s new in RC 2 anyway? Seems like Sun didn’t bother to update their page well enough to actually say.

I hope it will be up there soon, and I will update as well. In the meantime, go and download, even though the link still seems to point to RC 1: http://www.netbeans.info/downloads/download.php?type=5.0rc1 (from here.)

I hope this is the final release and work will start for NetBeans 6.0. Good luck, NetBeans dev team!

Seems like the integration between YourKit and NetBeans is far less than perfect. It’s almost at a non-working level.
Installation and integration into NetBeans went smooth (except for my rant here): NetBeans was inserted with a YourKit icon titled “Profile Main Application”. Great!

Now for the actual profiling. I had some code written to test the difference between LinkedList and ArrayList, as a response to the discussion evolving around this post. I decided to use that code to be profiled.

I clicked the profiling button YourKit supplied me with, and the application started running. YourKit warned me that it will change the build script, and it did. During the run phase, I saw these messages:



[YourKit Java Profiler 5.0.9] Using JVMTI
[YourKit Java Profiler 5.0.9] CPU times measuring is started

[YourKit Java Profiler 5.0.9] Profiler agent is listening on port 10001...
[YourKit Java Profiler 5.0.9] Launching profiler UI



The bolded line is quite puzzling, but I let it slide. I only used the most common things, and I don’t suspect they’ve been broken even if there were bugs.

The last line promised to launch the UI, and it did. Problem was, the application didn’t wait for it to launch it; So, YourKit was launched way after the application stopped running, and gather no information at all.

“I can deal with this”, I thought and continued to run the profiled application a second time, this time making sure YourKit is already running. To my surprise, YourKit just ignored the profiled process silently.

“Okay, so I’ll just start the profiling manually”, I thought. YourKit’s Welcome screen (shown above) offers an option to Connect to locally running profiled application. I ran my application, switched to YourKit, and tried to connect to my application. YourKit couldn’t find it.

At this point I gave up. I will try again tomorrow, though. I must say, however, that I have tried NetBeans Profiler and it gave me a very good impression. I will write more about it after I finish evaluating it, but for now I have a very good feeling about it.

P.S.
Yes, I know the picture shows a Windows computer. I used a different computer than my own for this, as YourKit provided some GUI difficulties on the Mac which I suspected were unique for that OS.

Okay, I know I promised this some time ago, and it’s really going to happen. I downloaded the NetBeans Profiler Milestone 11, and YourKit 5.0 with 15 days of free evaluation.

Just as with IDEA, YourKit has a free license for Open Source development – So don’t fear it (At least not if you’re in the open source business.)

I will also point out that I am going to run YourKit on NetBeans, and not on IDEA. This is to get some real idea of how things are when considering profiling on the same enviroment. Later, if there is any substantial difference, I will compare YourKit on IDEA and YourKit on NetBeans, even though I don’t think there will be such.

I haven’t used them both for a good enough review – I will do that tomorrow, first thing I can, and you’ll have a review around the same time tomorrow. Until then, let me just complain about installers for Mac not written by Mac users and not tested thoroughly.

For example, incidentally, let us consider YourKit’s installer. It asks you for the location of NetBeans. Now NetBeans, like any well behaved Mac OS X application, is using the Bundle mechanism so that the application’s runnable is actually hiding the entire application’s directory structure.

However, the Java Open Dialog doesn’t know this, and since the installer is restricting selection to “Directories only”, the user is semi-stuck. Only by digging up the full path of the bin directory inside the NetBeans pacakge could I successfully install YourKit.

Now, this is just a rant, but a justified one: If you’re releasing something for the Mac, at least have the courtesy to Test it, to make sure it matches the [sometimes strict] look and feel the OS promises to its users. Is that really too much to ask for?