JRockit Mission Control, introduced December last year, is a set of tools to monitor, manage and profile your application in production, with an amazingly low overhead. It includes a memory leak detector, an application and JVM profiler and a diagnostics console. In the short time Mission Control has existed, it has been successfully used to solve problems in all kinds of applications. There is a nice example of how the JRockit Memory Leak Detector was used to discover and find the cause of a memory leak over at the OSA foundation.
The first version of Mission Control is really three separate applications: the JRockit Management Console, the JRockit Runtime Analyzer (JRA), and the JRockit Memory Leak Detector. From talking to customers we realized that they were really happy with the performance and data gathered by the Mission Control applications, but that the user interfaces left some room for improvement. We also learnt that customers wanted all the functionality of Mission Control readily available from within one application. Some user interface elements parts would benefit from being consolidated and shared among the applications to create a more consistent workflow.
From our experience developing Mission Control, we realized we would need a better framework to support building the next generation of these tools. We also wanted a better framework to support creating new tools while enabling us to easily leverage prior work. We learnt that most users were either using Weblogic Workshop or Eclipse. Weblogic Workshop is now Eclipse based and BEA is putting a lot of energy (no pun intended) into Eclipse based tooling.
Needless to say, JRockit Mission Control 2.0 (internally dubbed Energy) is being developed as a set of Eclipse plug-ins. Energy will feature an improved user interface, and utilize new JRockit and 6.0 specific management features. You will be able to hook up your JRockit Mission Control 2.0 to JDK level 1.4, 5.0 and 6.0 versions of JRockit (version >= R27). The release is currently planned for the end of the year, where it will be included as a stand-alone RCP application, containing support for all the different tools in one easy to use application. Some time after that, it will most likely be available from the WLW update site as a set of Eclipse plug-ins. Best part is - upgrading from JRockit Mission Control 1.0 to 2.0 will be free!
For next year we're adding a new tool to the Mission Control suite. A tool that makes the java developer in me drool with excitement. Unfortunately I'm not at liberty to talk about it just yet. ;)
Stay tuned!
