| EclipseCon Report: Replay Unveils Recorder for Troubleshooting Java | | Print | |
| Sunday, 16 March 2008 | |
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Terming itself a Tivo device for Java web apps, Relay Solutions is unveiling a new tool that lets Java developers record their applications and play them back to spot bugs. The tool, being demo’ed at EclipseCon, uses an agent to sit on the server and record what happens inside a Java app, while snapshotting the conditions on the server on which it is housed. The tool is being shown following a successful beta at Netflix. Admittedly, the idea of recording computing sessions itself isn't new. For instance, GUI testing (also known as functional testing) “robots” have been around for years where you record a user’s interaction with a screen to regression test it. Similarly, there are numerous tools that can record transaction applications against a database. But these are all two-dimensional problems compared to instrumenting and recording an app, because you also run into issues like multi-threading, race conditions (when concurrent threads of a multithreaded application compete for processing the same data), memory management, interrupts, file I/O, and others. The key to Replay’s offering is a half dozen patents covering how they can snapshot many of the external variables that can impact what happened to a specific application at a specific point on a specific server at a specific time. According to CEO and co-founder Jonathan Lindo, the key a-ha was that, while computers are “deterministic” – that is, they do the same thing under the same conditions, havoc breaks out because in reality there are externalities that make actual execution non-deterministic. For anybody familiar with Murphy’s Law, that's not exactly an earth shattering revelation, but engineering a technology that account for as many of those randomly occurring events is key to reproducing what exactly happened when things went haywire. Replay built its experience in the video gaming industry, which as anyone below the age of 25 can testify firsthand, is where the real frontiers of computing lie. Later in Q2, Replay will release ReplayDIRECTOR, which will be available in three and a half versions: a freebie Express that works with Tomcat on an individual workstation, so developers can get their feet wet, an workgroup-oriented Team Edition that will be priced at roughly $400 a pop, and an Enterprise Edition that will likely be priced per server or buy the number of users.             |
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