posted by duncwinn on December 4, 2012 01:33 PM

People are still discovering the benefits of the free tool from VMware SpringSource, called Spring Insight Developer. This post provides an explanation of what Spring Insight Developer does, how to set it up with Apache Tomcat, and an example of available plugins.  For a better visual, there is also a video of the new Spring Insight 1.8.3 GUI embedded below.

Spring Insight is an extremely useful, time-saving, free tool for Spring developers and also has plugins for Grails, GemFire, Hadoop, Hibernate, JMS, JNDI, LDAP, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, Spring Batch, Spring Integration, Tomcat, and many more on Github.  In the latest release of Spring Insight, VMware introduced a new "split-agent" architecture that will enable this tool to be extended to more runtime languages besides Java, such as .NET, Ruby, PHP, Python, etc. There is also a bounty program where you can get paid to develop new plugin or offer to pay others.

What does Spring Insight Do?

In a nutshell, Spring Insight Developer lets you see what your code is doing. When, as a developer, you press a button in your application’s GUI, you can see what Java code is invoked, how it translates into SQL, and quite a bit more. Before we show it in action, it’s worth mentioning a few of the benefits.

• As mentioned, it’s free, and it’s also quite easy to download, set-up, and understand.
• Since Spring Insight uses AspectJ and AOP to load-time weave your application, you do not have to make any changes to your application code to use Spring Insight.
• It helps you code, test, troubleshoot, and iterate more quickly through development efforts.
• As you might expect, it also helps reduce project risk, makes applications more reliable, helps avoid releasing problem code into production, and makes troubleshooting production problems much easier.
• It works with Spring Insight Operations (read about the differences here) and vFabric Application Performance Manager within the vFabric Suite so that you can get the same view of code in a test, production, or other “live” system. For DevOps, this means we are all looking at the same information about application performance and problematic code.
• There are other benefits, like a plug-in based architecture, and you can read more about the approach to the “split-agent” architecture (i.e. how Spring Insight Operations works) in this article.

Let’s take a look at a simple example of tracing your app, viewing the details, and seeing the code in action.

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posted by jbrisbin on August 23, 2010 08:00 AM

Trying to keep up with web development trends is a full-time job. I don't mean that as hyperbole and anyone that is actively engaged in staying on top of emerging trends in web development knows how difficult it can sometimes be.

The developers actively involved in creating the new frameworks and defining the new meta-patterns aren't always helpful, either. Some web development communities—lived out largely in the form of forums and mailling lists—can be irksome to beginners and visual learners. Many developers feel a "you should be able to figure it out by reading the source code" attitude in that community. This deters many people from trying to learn these new patterns. They wait until there is a critical mass of developers and industry attention before taking the plunge. But this presents a software community with a classic catch-22: they need users to test their code but they can't get users because their code isn't tested. The process of accumulating enough users of a framework, including the essential bloggers, tutorial writers, and industry OpenSource "patrons", can often take four or five years—sometimes longer.

This was the case with MVC (Model-View-Controller, for those new to web development) just a few short years ago. I remember going to a Java user's group meeting where Spring (during the 1.0 timeframe) was presented and I was excited. I liked how the framework was put together and it was such a pleasant alternative to hooking servlets and JSP pages to EJBs. I was so opposed to using the "accepted" J2EE methods, in fact, I wrote my own XML-based framework from scratch rather than subject myself to the overhead and complexity of a J2EE application.

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