Java News from Wednesday, April 7, 2004

Sun has released JFluid 1.4.1, a profiler for Java that can profile "an arbitrary subset of a program that can be changed on-the-fly, while the program is running. This is a capability not available in any other profiling tool for Java at this time." JFluid relies on a unique dynamic bytecode instrumentation mechanism and thus only can run on a specially modified HotSpot VM. New features in 1.4.1 include:

• A sampled instrumentation CPU profiling mode, that combines advantages of instrumentation-based profiling (exact number of method invocations recorded) with those of sampling-based profiling (smaller overhead and greater precision for top-of-the-list methods).
• Monitors for number of threads, percentage of time spent in grabage collection, and surviving generations number.
• Object liveness profiling can be selectively disabled on-the-fly for unwanted classes
• Export CPU results as call chains

IBM's alphaWorks has released the Network Address Monitoring and Messaging API, "an engine and extensible API for monitoring interface addresses and programmatically responding to their changes. This API's versatile Java framework enables programmers to monitor changes of interface addresses, whether they be local to the machine on which the engine is running or accessible by other means. The engine will then invoke customized notification/messaging code, allowing another programmatic method by which updates can be made to services such as DNS, LDAP, RDBMS, or users and/or bots via e-mail."