BTrace -- a Simple Way to Instrument Running Java Applications

Sometimes you need to audit or profile your Java application. The easiest but most intrusive way to do this is to do a bunch of System.out.printlns (which is obviously bad) or to use loggers. After adding a lot of logging statements, your application becomes cluttered with unnecessary boilerplate code. Profiling, instrumentation or method measuring are great examples of cross-cutting concerns that might be nicely solved using AOP (Aspect Oriented Programming.) Basically, it allows you to invoke a certain action upon some defined conditions without the need for changing the instrumented code....

May 5, 2012 · 16 min