Static analysis for performance – the server side java symposium

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Overall, I was disappointed by the session. Most of it was about the performance anti-patterns and i was expecting more about the static analysis tool. There was only one slide with an example of how to detect a pattern using static analysis and I found it hard to understand,  It is easy to say to tell new developers not to do something.  It is hard to detect programatically.   Nevertheless, the points made are valid and here are the notes.

Is Java slow? Not on Intel for C at least.

What are root causes of performance issues?

  • Bad architecture, code or design
  • Configuration
  • [or database/network and not java at all, but that’s out of scope here]
  • Many ways to write incorrect code. Static analysis is not a replacement for traditional performance tuning

Types of analysis:

  • Code query systems – Explore relationships among program elements, Codequest and jquery in this space
  • Semantic code query systens – focus on behavior in addition to structure.  Yonita is in this space.  Yonita starts with bytecode to capture all detail. Then query in sql or prolog to find anti-patterns
  • Note that yonita is a prototype and not yet publicly available

Redundant work
Examples

  • JSF calling output text and the getXXX<> method makes a database call each time
  • get value for key several time.  Ok if took like Hibernate is caching it for you
  • make the same ajax call twice and then do something different than the result

Fix by caching the value
Showed patterns for detecting, it looks complicated!

Other anti-patterns

  • Fine grained remote calls – entity beans versions 1 and 2
  • One by one processing – adding one at a time instead of batching so the transaction, authorization and database all happen repeatedly
  • Return a lot of records and discard the results

I asked if the static analysis tools could detect all of the anti-patterns shown. The answer was that it is library specific. I didn’t get a clear yes or no as to whether one could write a rule.

Someone asked about complex configurations. The answer was the tools struggle with dynamic configuration like Spring and specific support of the tool is required.

Live from TSSJS – PostgreSQL with Tom

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Live blogging from TheServerSide Java Symposium with Tom Kincaid at his vendor presentation “Introduction to PostgreSQL for Development and Deployment”.  Tom spends a lot of time contrasing Postgres with MySQL, and commenting how since Oracle’s aquisition of MySQL, the licensing of MySQL is now much more restrictive. Tom says the licensing of Postgres is basically “Do what you want with the code but don’t bother us”.

1. Why has it not the most adopted open source DB?
Tom talks about some of the limitation of Postgres that prevented it from becoming one of the most adopted DBMS software including:

  • Early versions were Linux only with Windows support coming later
  • Installation was difficult
  • Default configuration was not neccessarily the best, and was designed for widest platform adoption
  • Lacked bundled distribution tools

Tom points out that originally, developers “first 20 mins” of using the product was often frustrating and would turn people off to the software.

2. Today’s Postgres
Postgres has made a number of changes in the last few years to grow Postgres has a more developer-friendly and easier-to-use product.  It also has been extended to work with all major IDEs, object-relational mapping tools such as JDBC, ODBC drivers, and stored procedures based in Java.  They have also spent time improving the GUI tools to compete with other major DBMS providers.  The GUI also shows performance tools and query plans.

Conclusion
The vendor sessions were abridged compared to the normal sessions so there was a lot Tom did not get to.  He did peak my interest in learning more about Postgres, now that it has grown to a more substational platform.  Tom’s belief is that everyone should use Postgres given its power and hands-off licensing, especially compared to the direction MySQL may be going.

Live from TSSJS – Spring Messaging with Mark

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I’m live blogging from “Message Driven Architecture with Spring” by Mark Fisher at TheServerSide Java Symposium.  Mark talks about how Spring messaging involved with the idea simple POJOs, similar to JMS.  Mark’s examples involve RabbitMQ, as one of the more recent and powerful messaging providers.  Below are some notes for this talk.

1.  AMQP
Mark introduces Advanced Message Queuing Protocol, AMQP for short, protocol as an alternative to standard JMS messaging but with a richer feature set including an advancing system of binding for filtering/routing of messages.  Also, AMQP templates are very similar to JMS templates.  Mark presented a number of slides with code examples of AMQP using the templates.

2.  MailSender
Mark presents MailSender, which can be used to send simple mail massages. 

3.  Lifecycle Management
The Spring SmartLifeCycle has been created in Spring 3.0 to help facilitate auto-start and graceful shutdown of listeners with the rest of the application.  This feature includes an optionaly isAutoStartup() attribute which can be used, for backwards compatibility and maintenance, to disable this feature.  By graceful shutdown, the components are stopped in the reverse order of startup, as needed.

4.  Task Execution
Create managed and pooled tasks that don’t need to be started manually (a big no-no)

5.  @Async
Async was added in Spring 3.0 that uses the @Async annotation for executor framework.

6.  Task Schedule
Built-in framework in Spring 3.0, no longer requires Quartz scheduling plugins and similar structures.  Supports recurring and cancelable tasks.  The @Scheduled(“*/5 * 9-17 * * ?”) annotation allows developers to build cron-like schedule tasks.  There is also an alternative solution to externalize the schedule information in XML so it’s tied to the code and the code does not require import statements for the annotations.  Finally, it supports meta-annotations that uses the @Scheduled annotation but points to XML reference in another location.

7.  Message Publishing Interceptor
Send message a by-product of another event.

Conclusion
Mark covered a large variety of material in a very short time, so I wasn’t able to write all the important points from his slides.  He did demonstrate a number of really useful features available in Spring 3.0 and showed how messaging in Spring has really grown to a more mature development platform.  He presentation was especially good because he managed to include demonstrations of the code alongside the spec information.