Terracotta Integrates Sun's VisualVM

• By John K. Waters
• 08/11/08

Java enterprise infrastructure software maker Terracotta recently announced it will soon be integrating Sun Microsystems' new Java VisualVM technology with the Terracotta management console.

The integration is meant to provide Java software developers and operators with what Terracotta calls "breakthrough visualization capabilities" that can help "reduce the cost of troubleshooting and tuning Java software."

According to the community Web site, the project is "dedicated to bringing the best available clustering technology to Java." Terracotta clusters Java Virtual Machines (JVMs) to create a shared memory pool at the Java application tier, which can be used to share data among servers. This shared memory pool can also be used to coordinate multiple JVMs' work.

The San Francisco-based company's Java infrastructure solution is a commercial offering based on the open-source project.

"VisualVM and Terracotta are a natural fit. VisualVM provides in-depth analysis of the virtual machine and Terracotta provides key information on cross-cluster issues," said Ari Zilka, CTO and co-founder of Terracotta, in a prepared statement.

"Terracotta is making a considerable investment in tools that will ease the transition from single servers or small clusters, to larger clusters," he continued. "Leveraging the Sun VisualVM technology will allow us to achieve this objective more rapidly."

Janet Koenig, director of Java Core Technologies at Sun, called the two products in a released statement "complementary technologies that can provide unique visibility across the application tier."

"Together they help accelerate and simplify the building, testing, tuning, and operation of their Java software," she continued.

The latest release will include a Cluster Visualization Tool that provides run-time statistics of a variety of issues, including system CPU, Java heap, thread dumps and many others.

Java VisualVM is being made available under the GNU General Public License v2 with Classpath Exception. The VisualVM binaries are available for download here.

The open source Terracotta project is supported by a number of contributor communities, including Spring, Tomcat and Geronimo.