Does VisualVM support REST API? - rest

Currently I am working on the subject Performance Testing and make a research for tools that perform such testings. For me it is important that the tool has Pre and Post Processing for REST service calls.
I did not find in the internet, whether it is possible with VisualVM. Does anyone have more information about the tool?
EDIT: It would be interesting to find out the following, too:
does it have a low overhead?
are custom performance profiles possible?
how reliable is the performance tracking?

Related

How to stress test a mongodb?

I like to run simulated test-clients that act as if e.g. 1000 clients execute tasks at the same time on a mongodb and see how the server stands. Together with profiling tools I like to be able to identify bottlenecks and fix them before they become a problem.
What tool would you to suggest to run simulated tests on an API Level?
What profiling tool would you suggest to identify bottlenecks, free tools are currently preferred.
After quite some research I came to the point to use jmeter to do massive REST calls. That way I can create a controlled load on the database. The profiling I do with node-inspector and native mongodb profiling.
For those who like to do a more "direct" test to the DB John Page's POCDriver (simulated client): https://github.com/johnlpage/POCDriver might be interesting.
Profile visualisation (from log files) can be done with: https://github.com/rueckstiess/mtools
Hope that helps :-)

Apache Stanbol scalability and real-world applications

I'm starting a project with requirements such as NLP, storage of semantic data, content managment etc. and Apache Stanbol seems like a nice fit, but I'm not exactly sure it's ready so I'm trying to make an appropriate assessment before starting to work with it, as there are few things that worry me:
Stanbol seems a bit young and immature (newest version 0.12). Has anybody used it in a commercial project/application/setup (I failed to find this information online)? What is the scale of those projects?
How horizontally scalable is Stanbol? What are its cloud/clustering capabilities? As far as I know it relies on Apache Jena for storage, and Jena storage isn't horizontally scalable which would make Stanbol unable to scale horizontally as well. I might be wrong about this, but this is my current understanding, please correct me if I'm wrong. Maybe Jena can be swapped with something else to be used as RDF storage provider and I'm not aware of it?
Learning resources for Stanbol seem a little scarce. Does anyone know of a place/book/whatever where I can get more understanding about Stanbol under the hood (other than the official Stanbol website and the IKS website)?
Are there any good alternatives? I know there are nice alternatives regarding NLP (e.g. GATE, UIMA), but they lack CMS capabilities.
Thanks.
To your question:
1) I've been working on a project involving Stanbol(version 0.10). Its
still in the pre production stage. For CMS, we evaluated JackRabbit
and Alfresco. Alfresco (CMIS) was found to be a better choice in our case. What I
like about stanbol is the enhancement chains and the set of
Enhancement
Engines
that come by default. This is a small to mid size project.
3) I found this book (Instant Apache Stanbol, Packt Publishing)
very practical and useful while going about with my work especially the sections on Entity hubs and Enhancement engines.
A viable option is to use Redlink that offers content analysis and linked data services in the cloud using Apache Stanbol and Apache Marmotta in the back-end.
The Readlink team has worked on IKS and Apache Stanbol; for these reasons getting in contact with them can be a good starting point when deciding to use these technologies in production environments.

Advices on server implementation for server/client structure iOS App development?

There are must be a lot of apps that are designed to communicate with server. My question is only about App installed on iOS device + Server side service interaction. Web app is not what I am talking about, and there should be no webpage involved in this discussion at all. Typical examples are Apps like Instagram and Twitter, in which most of the information exchanged between the App and the server is just data like String, Image and Integers(wrapped in JSON or XML), no webpage presentation needed.
My question will be: if you are an independent app developer, and you are designing such an app from scratch without any existing website API, database structure or application(so you are not limited by any existing API or database structure or application protocol), What will be the most efficient approach?
What the sever side need to do are:
receive data send by the App;
process the data with designed logic;
interact with database(like MySQL);
do necessary data mining and analysis---this could be a constantly running service or one time task requested by the App client;
send the data back to the App upon request or spontaneously;
exchange or broadcast the data between/among different App clients (i.e.: group chatroom and peer to peer message);
As far I as know there are 3 obvious options to implement the server side:
PHP
Python
Ruby on Rails
(please feel free to add more options)
My questions are:
which one is the most appropriate choice to implement the server side?
If the App is focusing intensively on natural human language/text searching, analyzing and data mining, which one is the best choice? I heard Python is doing pretty good in this area.
Any advice on the database choices? I am using MySQL for now, and I found it's quite powerful for my purposes, I heard Twitter is switching to Cassandra. Will that be too difficult to start with?
For the server end, if you need to build a Server management interface, for you as an admin to manage and monitor the community, membership, data and such, is there any existing solution, or framework or tool for that? what will be the most efficient approach?
If a new programmer has no experience in non of them, which one you suggest he/she to start with?
Is there any good reference material or sample code on the server side in such context we can learn from?
I know there are a lot of very experienced experts on these areas on Stackoverflow, but I saw more newbies who just entered the iOS developing area without much knowledge in server/database programming experience. And I hope this thread can help these who are thinking to design an App with server/client structure but have no idea where to start with.
ps: I will keep updating this question thread and adding my findings on this topic, to help all other users at stackoverflow. :-) Please try to make your answer informative, easy to understand, and constructive. I guess most of readers for this thread will be new members of this great community.
Are you sure you want to spend time & money to develop your own Server & develop your own API?
There are lots of mBaaS (mobile Backend as a Service) providers today such QuickBlox, Parse,StackMob, which are ready to use and they have great Custom Objects API and some of predefined modules. They have great free plans with big quota. Some of them such QuickBlox has Enterprise plan - so you can buy license and they server team update server for you purpose.
So, i recommend not develop your server and think about mBaaS market.
Just about your issue - I can recommend look at QuickBlox Custom Objects code sample and also Custom Objects API. Custom Objects module provides flexibility to define any data structure(schema) you need. Schema is defined in Administration Panel. The schema is called Class and contains field names and their type. I think it's what you need.
which one is the most appropriate choice to implement the server
side?
Well that depends on what you know, there is reason to choice one of the other
If the App is focusing intensively on natural human language/text
searching, analyzing and data mining, which one is the best choice? I
heard Python is doing pretty good in this area.
This would reflect on your first question, you pick the language on you needs. Thus if python makes it easier then pick that one.
Any advice on the database choices? I am using MySQL for now, and I
found it's quite powerful for my purposes, I heard Twitter is
switching to Cassandra. Will that be too difficult to start with?
Again not one that is easy to answer, since it all has to do with requirements. But any SQL server will do. Cassandra is meant for "scalability and high availability without compromising performance" accourding to there website. Do you think you webservice will get many request then it might be a choice to consider.
For the server end, if you need to build a Server management
interface, for you as an admin to manage and monitor the community,
membership, data and such, is there any existing solution, or
framework or tool for that? what will be the most efficient approach?
This again is only going to be answered when you pick the a SQL server and server language.
If a new programmer has no experience in non of them, which one you
suggest he/she to start with?
Start with something simpler, you are really going out on a limb here.
Is there any good reference material or sample code on the server
side in such context we can learn from?
Propably there is some, but you should really start small and work from there.
Twitter started out as a Rub on Rails app and is working on scalability and availability which ruby is not really good ar (that is my person opinion). or Look at facebook they have written a php to c compiler to make php run faster.
The only thing I can say to start code, when you app does take off then tackle the some of the performance issues.
And since you state that you are new to programming do not bite of more then you can chew.
This is a huge question and I don't think there is a best answer. It most depends on what you care about, such as how quickly the development process, how easily the implementation, etc.
And which one is popular, which one is cool, I don't think it make really sense.
In my personal opinion, I'm good at ASP.NET and I can get Windows server easily, so I'll start with an ASP.NET service to provides data.
And, to be continued.

Jitterbit vs. BizTalk

Is there anyone who has used or looked into using Jitterbit as well as BizTalk? If so, what are some pros and cons of each, and which one did you go with as your final solution?
Specifically, I'm looking for SAP integration, but any input would be appreciated.
Like Rob I have not heard about JitterBit until reading your question (thanks!), I have, however, been working with BizTalk, almost exclusively, for the past 9 years; for that reason I wasn't sure I should be responding, but as Rob did, and nobody else has, I figured it's worth a couple of cents....
From the little reading I've done it seems to me that JitterBit, apart from being an open source, which has it's pros and cons, is trying to lower the entry barrier by offering a relative simple solution with the promise of rapid development and drag-n-drop approach "with no custom code".
I'll take their promise at face value, as I know nothing about it, although I have my doubts, so let's assume developing with JitterBit is really easy, there's one thing I can clearly state - developing with BizTalk isn't.
But, and that's a bit but in my view, developing with BizTalk is somewhat difficult not because Microsoft did a bad job at it, on the contrary - developing with BizTalk is somewhat difficult because Microsoft wanted to create a tool that could realistically allow enterprises to solve their BPM and integration needs well, and, in my experience, these problems are almost never simple, so Microsoft had built a server that has many capabilities, is very strong and very flexible, at the cost of complexity.
So, while any experienced technical sales guy can give you a demo of an integration scenario that is very simple, and is developed in a few minutes using a lot of drag and drop and configuration, even in BizTalk, but is this a realistic enterprise-level solution? was it a realistic scenario that was demonstrated? from my experience the answer is almost exclusively no; the problems tend to be complex, and their require a more robust solution.
So, I guess the bottom line would be - if you're looking for a one off solution, and open source is something you guys work with - JitterBit is definitely worth looking at, seeing if it's capable of helping out and has, indeed, a short learning curve (it would be important to look at maintenance, monitoring, trouble shooting, instance management etc)
If, however, you believe, as is often the case, that your solution would grow to become a BPM/integration platform in your organisation, and you need something more robust - I would put my money on BizTalk being a better candidate.
I've done a fair bit of integration with SAP, starting with the old SAP DCOM connector. More recently I've been involved in the selection of an integration platform to serve in an Enterprise Service Bus pattern.
We did web service samples to connect to SAP on a number of platforms, including BizTalk, Mule, Netweaver, Webmethods and Tibco. Webmethods won out based on licensing and capability, though BizTalk and Netweaver both had very high marks.
Jitterbit was not part of the evaluation - in fact I had to look it up to be sure I understood your question.
If your goal is just to be able to call an RFC, the .NET SAP connector works well.
If your goal is to expose a web service to wrapper a process in SAP, then BizTalk is good, but I recommend you see if your organization already has netweaver licensed as there are many web services available directly from SAP with no coding.
My recommendation is to avoid Jitterbug and Mule for the enterprise for now - unless Open Source is actually a popular thing at your place of employment. Netweaver and BizTalk are very robust, polished products.
If you are looking for something you can ship easily, then Jitterbug may make more sense. Though generally I'd recommend you define it as a web service call, and look to your customers technology stack for the most appropriate integration technique.
More context of what you are looking to achieve will enable a more accurate answer.
Michael,
We use Jitterbit in our organization and we've been very successful with it in various projects. Our SAP projects use XI and Jitterbit has dramatically simplified the ability to integrate web service interfaces with the various protocols it supports.
In addition to an excellent price (and we now subscribe to Jitterbit for support) we realize great value out of the support service. If we have any questions during our implementations they seem to provide all the subject matter expertise included in the support cost, so we're quite self sufficient.
We still have many other integration solutions in our company including VB and Java programs; it's a mess, but we don't believe that any one platform will meet all of our different divisions' needs. We have been using open source, specifically Linux and Apache for many years now, although IBM and Microsoft are also prevalent here.
We went with Jitterbit as it supports protocols needed to integrate any modern system and with SOA / Web Services being our stated direction Jitterbit was a great fit for what we needed.
Given that Jitterbit is Open Source, I would encourage you to download it and try it out.
I will say it simply, I have been using biztalk and was one of the people that helped validate the 2006 training course. Biztalk by far one the best server applications for Business process that is available today. You do also have to factor in the price point is ridiculously low compared to what else is out there.

Profiling WebMethods services?

What techniques are available to profile services running in WebMethods Integration Server?
That is, to obtain data which would indicate which parts would benefit most from optimisation.
Check the 'Service Profiler for webMethods Integration Server' from http://www.wrightia.com/serviceprofiler.html
Have you thought of trying webMUnit?
You could add time logging around certain method calls to get an idea of how long things are taking to execute. However, the time logging itself will add overhead too, so just keep that in mind.
Or possibly memory profilers such as YourKit Profiler, JProfiler, JProbe etc? Im not sure about these, as I've never used them myself, but they might help by letting you know what's taking up a lot of memory etc
Another tool which will do it is Green Hat tester which is a commercial tool used for testing webMethods. If you use the reporting capabilities of that when running tests you get profiling information generated..
António Abreu's linked tool is a more dedicated profiling tool however and would be the simplest solution.
If you want an "out of the box" solution you could turn on service auditing for the called services and do the legwork yourself, but that's a bit of manual effort.
You can find here a new monitoring tool for IS services: Rich Statistics
I was involved only in development phase so i dont know details but our system was tested with heavy load-testing and hardware was monitored during the process, it actually gave some feedback about bottlenecks. JMeter and sar were used.