Hermes

You may have wanted to peak into a queue or topic. Did you find a suitable tool for it? I have used Hermes, and I had a pleasant experience.

Hermes is a Swing application that allows you to interact with JMS providers. Hermes will work with any JMS enabled transport making it easy to browse or seach queues and topics, copy messages around and delete them. It fully integrates with JNDI letting you discover administered objects stored, create JMS sessions from the connection factories and use any destinations found. Many providers include a plugin that uses the native API to do non-JMS things like getting queue depths (and other statistics) or finding queue and topic names.

It offers some nice tutorials of setting it up with the JMS provider you are using. For example, check out the tutorial for setting up Hermes with JBoss 4.X. It can be used as well as a good example for JMS providers configured via JNDI.

Technorati tags: Hermes JMS, Swing, JNDI, tutorial, tools.

EMMA - Code Coverage

A free Java Code Coverage Tool

Recently I have used EMMA and I have been completely satisfied with the results it provided. Before I started working, I have also tried out the Borland code coverage tool from the Optimizeit enterprise suite, but the tools differ from each other, as well as the reports which are generated. I find the EMMA report easier to overview, and more user friendly. Plus it is free. I guess it can take a little time until you get familiar with it, but it is worth the effort.

"EMMA distinguishes itself from other tools by going after a unique feature combination: support for large-scale enterprise software development while keeping individual developer's work fast and iterative ... " as the "Borland Optimizeit Code Coverage gives developers the confidence that their code is ready to deploy when performance checks are run during development". (Sources: EMMA, Optimizeit.)

Here you can check out two sample coverage reports:

• Optimizeit report
• EMMA report
  

Both tools have the advantage that they can be integrated with Eclipse IDE. Though EMMA does not have a plugin for Eclipse, the way to use it from Eclipse is adding EMMA tasks to your ANT build. You can read the step by step instructions here. Like this you are enabled to run an application from ANT "so that coverage instrumentation is performed on-the-fly, as the classes are loaded by the JVM", and then the same process is repeated by breaking it into distinct instrumentation/execution/reporting steps. What I particularly like about EMMA is the option of separating instrumentation and execution (Offline mode). This is useful when there is a necessity of collecting and merging coverage data from multiple execution runs and multiple JVM processes.

Lance Finney has found EMMA to be a winner-tool: "Emma uses an interesting approach to defining coverage that often results in lines being only partially covered. For example, lines with ternary operators with only one branch executed will show as partially executed".

Technorati tags: code coverage, Emma code coverage, Ant.

Google - Future is Nearby

I just had this thought: when you want to find more information on a person, on a concept, on a book or even on some corporation, I guess how you would start your quest would be is you startup a browser and you type in all the address, or just some letters, or with some special key combination you get it in front of you: the Google search engine. It is not unusual to use other engines, but I think Google is preferred to others by most of us.
And what if you want - suppose in the nearby future - to find some information on Google itself. Information on their history, on the services they offer, on the projects they are involved in. Which engine will you use to execute your search? I just think it is rather interesting to search on Google with Google. I guess you don't think you will have to.
I see Google growing and offering more and more web services. And there is no sign to show the opposite. Don't forget, we already can have our own personalized Google homepages.
Nevertheless, futuristic ideas already exist on Google, as well the sketch of their homepage. Ckeck it out.

Technorati tags: Google.