The English New Year Intro:

Hi all readers,
the last reports show the lack of articles was a major issue for Gioorgi.com

My time was heavily compressed by my forthcoming baby (I will dad in a few months guys!).

Also my Job as Senior Consultant required a lot of my energy.

Gioorgi is bi-lingual, so the English guys can expect articles on the following:

• Software trends
• RedScorpion Code snippet
• A new look, which will slowly grows in the next months

And now the Italian intro:

Un caloroso e felice 2010 a tutti i lettori di Gioorgi.com.
Purtroppo a causa di motivi personali (un bimbo in arrivo a maggio) e del troppo lavoro, negli ultimi mesi non sono riuscito a dedicarmi a Gioorgi.com come dovevo.

Nel tentativo di conciliare le nuove esigenze, ecco quello che troverete sul sito nel 2010:

• Articoli tecnici di informatica in inglese
  Mi dispiace ma “English is the king of IT” e per rendere più aperto il confronto con le miriade di sviluppatori su Internet, non posso usare l’italiano. RedScorpion è l’etichetta che raggruppa tutti questi aspetti.
• Storie di follia, magia e simpatia, di cui già avete avuto un assaggio, molto apprezzato
• Un pizzico di politica, ma a caso e quando serve.
• Recensioni di libri, vecchi e nuovi
• Un nuovo look, essenziale ma che sarà sempre più curato con il passare del tempo.

JQuery Debugger is a small debugger developed by Gio, for every day ajax development.
JQuery Debugger is very light and not-intrusive. It places a “view source” button.

The “View source” button pop up a window with the html source

It is still in beta stage, but you can try it out.

Speed Intro

1. Grap the last JQuery, and include it in you pages
2. Download the debugger.js script here debuggerBeta1.js (30)
3. Add the following lines to the footer of all your html pages:
   <script type=”text/javascript”>DEBUG = true;</script>
   <script src=”./debuggerBeta1.js” type=”text/javascript”></script>
   <div id=’debugger_bottom_bar’/>
4. Give me your feedback with a comment below!

April (Application Performance Framework) is a super-light application framework based on Spring, featuring:

• An Aspect Oriennted Programing Performance Monitor, which try to increase performance on the fly
• A super-light XML-RPC communication framework

April first commitment is “be lite, be pluggable” and do not re-invent the wheel.
I am happy to describe here how it works the Beta 0.2, called “Fat Cat” by friends.

Getting Started with April

April is a self-contained package, you can download here:

April project has been developed under Eclipse Ganymede, which is higly recommended. Anyway an ant build script is provided.

The project binary results in a webapp (war) you can deploy under your preferred application server.

How it works

The april demo is composed of a FileMonitor utility used to monitor file changes across a file system.

The core of April is the PerformanceMonitor, which is an aspect configured via Spring: take a look to the aopMonitor.xml located under april/war/WEB-INF/spring/ folder.

The performance monitor will start measuring the performance of every methods defined in the pointcut. When one method is too slow, the Performance Monitor will check if the method belongs to a class implementing the “AutoTune” interface.

If the AutoTune interface is implemented, the PerformanceMonitor will ask to the object if it can be opttimized via a call to

public boolean canBeOptimized();

If the method returns true, Performance Monitor will begin the optimization phase.

The optimization phase

The Performance monitor will invoke the following method of the AutoTune interface

public Runnable split() throws Exception

Is up to the implementation to return a new runnable object, which will do a part of the work.
The returned object need not to be of the same type of the AutoTune implementor  (ATI).

The idea behind

The idea is to find bottleneck based on how much time a method takes to run. The monitor then asks to a slow instance to spawn another thread.

This approach cannot solve every issue, but it seems effective on some scenarios, because it can “follow”  the bottlenecks when they change position.

The call is performed before the return statement of the “slow” method, and a global lock is used to guarantee only one spawn request at the time.

The post-optimization phase (speculation)

This phase is fired via the AutoTune method

public void mergeWith(AutoTune candidate2);

but it is still unfinished and unstable, so it is disabled for the meantime.
I am evaluting different approaches, and every comment is welcome.

Do you like April? Do you have an idea for improving it? Leave a comment below!

Release History

• April 0.2 is the first full english release.
• April 0.1 was a “request for comments” release, published in this italian article. It was released on April 8th , 2009