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Launched last September, jclarityis now offering two productsaround Java performance:Illuminate and Censum. Illuminateis a performance monitoringtool, while Censum is anapplication focused on garbagecollection logs analysis. More thanjust collecting data or visualizing it,both tools provide actionableinsights to solve the issues theydetect.

“What we want to do is to move the problem from data collection to data analysis and insight”Co-Founder Ben Evans.

Key features

• Bottleneck detection (Disk I/O, Garbage Collection, Deadlocks, and more).

• Action plan – Recommendations to solve the problem, such as “The application needs to increase the number of active threads”.

• Explanation – Defining the problem in general and the common causes for it, for example “A high percentage of time spent paused in GC may mean that the heap has been under-sized”.

What’s unique about it

Offers the next step after monitoring and identifying your performance problems –actionable insights to solve issues on the spot.

Behind the curtain

London based JClarity was founded byMartijn Verburg, Kirk Pepperdin and BenEvans, all are well known Javaperformance veterans.

Java developers are being kept inthe dark in a way when importinglibraries from “anonymous”repositories. Bintray adds a face tothe code and actually, serves as asocial platform for developers toshare open-source packages (Didsomeone say GitHub for binaries?Login with GitHub for the fullinception effect to kick in). It has over85,000 packages in 18,000repositories, while showcasingpopular repositories and newreleases.

Key features

• Upload your binaries for the world to see, get feedback and interact with other developers.

• Download libraries with Gradle / Maven / Yum / Apt, or just directly.

• Manage release notes and documentation.

• REST API – Search / Retrieve binaries and automate distribution.

What’s unique about it

Bintray’s basic functionality is similar to Maven Central. However, it adds a social layer and offers an easy process to upload files to a CDN.

Behind the curtain

Bintray is developed by JFrog, based inIsrael and California. It was made publicApril last year and won Duke’s choiceaward at the last JavaOne conference.JFrog is also the companybehind Artifactory. Which is also hostedon Bintray. Of course.

A hosted service for monitoringand managing cloud applications,Librato can create customdashboards in seconds without aneed to set up or deploy anysoftware. Oh, and it just looks andfeels so buttery smooth comparedto other dashboards.

“Data is only as valuable as the actionable insights you can surface from it”

Says Joe Ruscio, Co-Founder & CTO.

Key features

• Data collection: Integration with Heroku,AWS, tens of collection agents (Even Nest)and pure language bindings with Java,Clojure and others.

• Custom reports: Metrics & alerts throughemail, HipChat, Campfire, and just HTTPPOST requests to integrate with anythingyou can think of.

• Data visualization: Beautiful graphs withannotations, correlations, sharing andembedding options.

• Alerts: Automatic notifications whenmetrics cross certain thresholds.

What’s unique about it

It would be hard to find anything that Librato doesn’t know how to talk with and help make sense of its data.

Behind the curtain

Based in San Francisco, Libratowas founded by Fred van den Bosch, JoeRuscio, Mike Heffner and Dan Stodin.

Takipi was built with asimple objective in mind:Telling developers exactlywhen and why productioncode breaks. Whenever anew exception is thrown or alog error occurs – Takipicaptures it and shows you thevariable state which causedit, across methods andmachines. Takipi will overlaythis over the actual codewhich executed at themoment of error – so you cananalyze the exception as ifyou were there when ithappened.

Key features

• Detect – Caught/uncaught exceptions, Http and logged errors.

• Prioritize – How often errors happen across your cluster, if they involve new or modified code, and whether that rate is increasing.

• Analyze – See the actual code and variable state, even across different machines and applications.

What’s unique about it

God mode in production code. Shows you the exact code and variable state at the moment of error, as if you were there when it happened.

Behind the curtain

Psst, it’s us. Takipi was founded in 2012and based in San Francisco and Tel Aviv.Each exception type and error has aunique monster that represents it.

Elasticsearch has beenaround for a while, butElasticsearch 1.0.0 wasreleased just recently inFebruary. It’s an open-sourceproject built on topof Apache Lucene and hostedon GitHub with over 200contributors. You can checkout the code right here. Themain promise Elasticsearchprovides is an easy to usescalable distributed RESTfulsearch.

Key features

• Near real-time document store whereeach field is indexed and searchable.

• Distributed search with an architecturebuilt to scale from small to largeapplications.

• A RESTful and a native Java API amongothers. It also has a library for Hadoop.

• Works out of the box and doesn’tnecessarily require deep understanding ofsearch, it can also be schema free so youcan start real fast.

What’s unique about it

Like it says on the tin, it’s elastic. Built with flexibility and ease of use in mind, provides an easy place to start and to scale without compromising on hardcore features and customization options.

Behind the curtain

Elasticsearch was founded by Shay Banonback in 2010 and just recentlyraised $70M in funding. Before foundingit Banon ran the Compass open-sourceproject and is now a renowned searchexpert. His motivation to get into search?An application he built for his wife tostore and retrieve her favorite recipes.

Back to pure Java, Spark is a Sinatra inspired micro web framework for quickly creating web applications. It was rewritten last month to support Java 8 and lambdas, Spark is open-source and its code is available on GitHubright here. It’s being developed by Per Wendeland a small number of contributors over the last few years in a mission to support rapid creation of web applications with minimal effort.

Key features

• Quick and simple setup for your firstdeployment.

• Intuitive route matcher.• A template engine to create reusable

components that supports Freemarker,Apache Velocity and Mustache.

• Standalone Spark runs on Jetty but canalso run on Tomcat.

What’s unique about it

A picture is worth a 1000 words, but a screenshot would be more straightforward. Check it out.

Behind the curtain

Per Wendel is the Sweden based founderof Spark, working on Spark with over 20contributors. Check out the discussiongroup and learn more about Spark, howyou can contribute and solve issues.

Going deeper in the JVM, the Garbage Collector scans for objects that are no longer being used. However, sometimes developers will still hold references to objects in memory they no longer use. This is where memory leaks happen, and where Plumbr comes in. It detects and reports if the application has memory leakage issues and provides actionable information to fix it.

Key features

• Live memory leak detection and alerts.• A report with time, size, velocity (MB/h)

and significance of the leak.• The location of the memory leak in your

code.

What’s unique about it

Quick and to the point, gathering insights from your code and telling you what you need to fix.

Behind the curtain

Based in Estonia, Plumbr was founded byPriit Potter, Ivo Mägi, Nikita Salnikov-Tarnovski and Vladimir Šor. Joining forcesin a seasoned Java team, mostly knownas “the guys who help projects that arestuck”. Makes sense.

http://www.takipiblog.com/7-new-tools-java-developers-should-know/