Profiling and tuning Eclipse Plug-ins using TPTP

Introduction to TPTP and its sub-projects

TPTP (Eclipse Test & Performance Tools Platform) is an open source subproject under the Eclipse Foundation, providing a set of Eclipse based tools to support various phases of software development. Basically has covered the whole process from test to runtime performance analysis, running state, log analysis. From the homepage of its project, its main developers are from large companies including IBM and Intel. More importantly, because of its openness, it makes it very easy to develop tools based on it, thus greatly reducing the threshold for developing "software development AIDS".

The TPTP project includes the following subprojects to provide support for all phases of software development:

Platform

TPTP has built its infrastructure into a single subproject, and this shows that TPTP is not just about providing tools for supporting software development, it's about providing a platform for more software development aids to build on. In fact, many commercial testing tools are developed on the market based on TPTP.

The project provides a common data structure, interface display elements, data collection and communication control mechanism in TPTP. It provides a range of extension points so that downstream projects can easily extend and reuse these features.

Testing tools

As a basic framework for building test tools, this subproject provides a common set of features for a test tool. Examples include reporting and analysis for implementation testing, preparation of execution environments, and test results. In addition, the project serves as an example of this infrastructure, providing a JUnit based component Test tool, a WEB performance test tool, and a manual test tool.

Tracing and Profiling Tools

This project mainly solves the Software runtime State analysis. The focus is on data collection and analysis reports. Based on the Java Jvmpi monitoring agent, it can not only analyze local running programs, but also monitor and analyze applications running on different JVMs and even different machines.

Monitoring Tools

According to the application development lifecycle, the project is responsible for the relatively late part, it is mainly responsible for the application of the runtime monitoring and log analysis. This tool (or a tool built on the infrastructure) allows you to monitor the application runtime's various system resources. and through its log analysis function to the application of the Run-time log analysis to achieve the application of the runtime state monitoring purposes.

As you can see, TPTP and its various subprojects have basically covered all stages of the application development process. As a software developer, we are more concerned with using TPTP to conduct a comprehensive analysis of the applications we develop, especially performance analysis to find performance bottlenecks to further optimize the application. So tracing and Profiling tools should be the most useful tool from a software developer's point of view.

Installation of TPTP

As a set of Eclipse Plug-ins, the TPTP installation is very similar to the installation of other plug-ins. Below is a detailed description of its installation steps and some considerations during the installation process.

Download software

TPTP currently offers downloads based on Windows and Linux two platforms, and the latest version of this article is 4.6.1, which supports the latest version of Eclipse 3.5.1. It should be noted that the TPTP version has a relatively strict correspondence with the Eclipse version. You need to download the corresponding version of TPTP based on the eclipse you are using. In addition, TPTP is also dependent on other components, please ensure that your ECLIPSE environment has met the TPTP requirements before downloading.

Alternatively, you can download the complete TPTP package that contains all the subprojects, and optionally download a separate package.

As described in the previous article, the "platform" subproject is the basis for all other projects, and if you choose to download the required packages separately, please do not forget to download the installation platform package at the same time.

Download Runtime and SDK two kinds. If you don't want to build your own tools based on the framework, you can download only the Runtime package.

Specific download requirements and addresses can be found on their product downloads page:

http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/home/downloads/

At the same time, there is also the download of Agent Controller, which allows you to use TPTP to monitor applications on different machines in real time. If the monitored application is in the same system as TPTP, you may not need to install this component separately.

Alternatively, you can install TPTP through Eclipse's update Manager, which can be referenced in the following ways:

http://www.eclipse.org/tptp/home/downloads/updateManager.php

But the TPTP file is relatively large, the author suggests or the first download the file to install themselves, so that the installation process faster.