XRebel 2.0 with Application Profiling

From the very start, our users requested profiler capabilities in XRebel. As of 2.0, it is possible to get the performance overview for every request and identify the slowest methods.

The profiler view shows the time distribution in the call tree by assigning the percentages to the individual nodes that represent method invocations. The slowest methods are also accompanied with an extra percentage figure that indicates the method own contribution time.

JSP tag mapping is one neat little feature, new in XRebel 2.0. Instead of a cryptic runtime name XRebel displays the real JSP tag.

In 2.0, there are some more notable improvements to the existing features. The session component is now able to handle very large HTTP session snapshots. And of course, there's a ton of little UI improvements -- all to make the profiler more pleasant to use.

Links for XRebel:

• Download
• Features
• Documentation

Grails 3 Released. Setting up -javaagent

Grails 3 was released just recently and with all the new stuff it looks really-really-really awesome release! (Really hope that Grails will find the new home now). The two key changes for me are 1) moving to Gradle instead of Gant, and 2) building on top of Spring Boot. NOw it looks like it's basically the Gradle project with custom conventions that are derived from Grails 2.x.

For the first time, it feels like Grails is not a toy framework any more :)

What's not that cool (my own very subjective opinion), is the introduction of application.yml. It's almost impossible to modify it without reading the documentation. Even XML version of it (yes!) would have been more practical.

There are many other nice things added - go look for yourself.

Setting up a -javaagent argument for Grails 3

My personal interest with any new framework or server is usually related to the projects I'm working with. Thus, the first thing I wanted to check is how could I set up a -javaagent for Grails 3 application. Turns out, it's not as simple as you would expect.

Thanks to @bsideup, here's the snippet that you'd have to add to build.gradle file to setup a -javaagent argument, given that the agent JAR is located somewhere in file system:

	//in build.gradle:
	project.afterEvaluate {
	for (Task task : project.getTasks()) {
	if (task instanceof JavaExec) {
	(task as JavaExec).jvmArgs "-javaagent:xrebel.jar"
	}
	}
	}

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

In the example above, xrebel.jar is the agent package that is located somewhere in my file system. One can use the absolute path just fine in there.

Here's the another snippet, with DSL-style:

	//in build.gradle:
	tasks.withType(JavaExec) { jvmArgs "-javaagent:xrebel.jar" }

view raw gistfile1.txt hosted with ❤ by GitHub

With this, I can confirm, that XRebel works with Grails 3 :)