úterý 23. července 2013

Welcome to PerfCake

Today I received a printed copy of a new book published at Pack - JBoss AS 7 Development. I did a review of the book (I appologize to Francesco Marchioni for being such a bas*ard) so they gave me a small paragraph in the credits. How does that relate to PerfCake? There is a hardly noticeable marketing of PerfCake. Well, to be honest, it says that I publish articles on the PerfCake blog. So I guess it is the right time to start now ;-)

So what is PerfCake? As you can see on its home page - PerfCake is a lightweight performance testing tool and a load generator with the aim to be minimalistic, easy to use, provide stable results, have minimum influence on the measured system, be platform independent, use component design, allow high troughput. There is also a more detailed description...

So what really is PerfCake? Ok, did you play with some nice building kit® as a kid? We did! And we liked it so much that we wanted exactly the same kit for performance testing. For us to be able to independently specify what, how and when should be tested. Once we might want to compose a castle, the other time a space ship, and yet we can reuse the basic blocks. Why did not we choose any existing tool? There is a separate blog post on this topic coming soon. But the long story short - we wanted exactly the attributes mentioned in the previous paragraph. And we did not succeed in our quest for such a tool. So we helped ourselves and developed it. After several years of testing performance of various Java Middleware products we realized that our tool is really advanced and production ready. So let's open source it!

Whoa, young boys! We wanted to provide you something really cool. And we only had just the tool that did its job right, had all the attributes, but was only for brave knight riders. Over the nights, while our families were sleeping, we did a major rework of each of the part. Actually, this is still undergoing, but we are almost there.

Our main goal for this summer is to release the version 1.0. This includes a complete web site (all downloads working), complete documentation, the source code we can be proud of, high test coverage (all interface contract conditions must be tested for example), and a couple of success stories on this blog.

We would like to encourage you to give us some feedback on what you are missing in your favorite performance testing tool, to even become a member of our community, or to send us a bug report. And we would be happy to help you use PerfCake in your environment, for you to be able to provide us a success story.

Feel free to try to reach us by any of the means mentioned on the community page.