Compuware today debuted new versions of OptimalJ, Vantage Analyzer and DevPartner Java Edition to improve development across the company’s Java enterprise suite.
The update to OptimalJ 3.2 Java enterprise development tool, which the company released at the end of last June, expands the product’s Model Driven Pattern Based (MDPB) approach to development, which allows for greater reuse of services and components. OptimalJ 3.3 gives developers the ability to model application page flow.
“What we’ve done in OptimalJ 3.3 is taken that modeling notion to another area that we think can be automated, and that’s the user interface,” Mike Sawicki, Compuware OptimalJ product manager, told internetnews.com.
Version 3.3 also introduces a pair of new features that come by way integration. Through integration with Compuware requirements management tool SteelTrace Catalyze, developers can capture business requirements and have them propagate into OptimalJ automatically. From the OptimalJ side, developers can then use the tool to track back to the root business requirements.
The development tool also integrates with iWay, OptimalJ 3.3 can also integrate with SAP R/3, allowing developers the opportunity for code re-use.
“Every application development project really is an integration project,” Mike Burba, manager of strategic initiatives, explained to internetnews.com. “When you look at enterprise IT, if it’s a mission-critical app, it’s going to have to connect with other systems.”
The service management application Vantage Analyzer for J2EE is a new extension to Compuware’s Vantage service management solution, which provides a Java monitoring and analysis application. Vantage Analyzer is billed as an end-to-end detailed analysis tool that integrates memory, network CPU and SQL performance measures.
Lloyd Bloom, Vantage product manager, explained that it was written in C/C++ and, as such, has a lower performance overhead for 24/7 production environments. Bloom also detailed the depth of analysis the product provides, including information on workloads and transactions, as well as what component of a transaction each method is calling.
“So we understand what beans and other methods are called and the time spent on each, ” Bloom said. “Now we have the ability to go into the backend and get down to the precise cause of the problem.”
To round out the trio of updates, Compuware enhanced its application debugging and analysis tool, DevPartner Java Edition. Version 3.3 adds a pair of features that improve the level of analysis that is possible with this suite of productivity and profiling tools.
Eclipse 3.0 support and integration with the JUnit testing framework have been included. The company also added Transaction breakdown capability so developers can more rapidly identify how modules contribute to the response times of transactions.
The other item that DevPartner Java Edition 3.3 improves upon is memory utilization. According to Burba, it is usually difficult for analysis tools to know where memory leaks are. He believes what usually happens is that approximately 90 percent of the items that are identified as memory leaks (by other memory utilization tools) are actually false positives.
“What DevPartner Java does with this new functionality is it tracks when the Java Virtual Machine persists, and it tracks the associations between other objects,” Burba explained. “So that if you do have an object that hasn’t necessarily been used in a while but still needs to be allocated in memory, it’s not going to show that as a memory leak. It radically reduces the number of false positives when doing memory analysis.”
