In Brief (Continued)

The EDK allows developers to profile services and import data about users from any system, allowing for widely distributed applications. The authentication services synchronize with various user directories and authenticate users, allowing for simpler sign-on. The crawler services identify new content from other repositories, the search services federate searches to other search engines, and the portlet feature allows applications and Web interfaces to be personalized.

The EDK is free, but the portal is most definitely not. It starts at $90,000 for a 250-user license and goes up. See Plumtree's Web site for more information.

Plumtree Software
Phone: (800) 810-7586; (415) 399-7050
Fax: (415) 263-8991
Web: www.plumtree.com

Testing/Debugging
RootCause 2.1
OC Systems announced an upgrade to its memory leak tracker at the JavaOne conference, making the tool completely automated instead of having to manually tear through every component of a Java application. RootCause 2.1 scans the entire application and all of its components, from objects to native code, the application and data server, the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) and third-party products that touch the application. If there's a memory leak anywhere in the application, RootCause will touch it.

RootCause is focused on tracking the allocation and deallocation of objects in an application and identifies objects that haven't been deallocated, which are the most likely causes of application bloat while it runs over a long period.

"With Java apps in general and J2EE in particular, everyone complained about things growing. Java was supposed to solve this with garbage collection, but you still get data structures that grow unbounded," said Oliver Cole, president of OC Systems.

Garbage collection is only useful if you don't reference an object, but if an object is referenced anywhere in an application, it stays in memory unless it's specifically deallocated, which programmers often forget to do. RootCause tells people what to deallocate because it runs over time, so it notices that an object appears to grow due to a data structure growing unbounded. RootCause can be run in the background while an application executes, and it will scan the whole application over time and see where there are unbounded applications and objects not being deallocated. It monitors the code while being executed and does not touch the source code.

RootCause 2.1 is available now from OC Systems for $2,995 for the analysis application and $995 for agents, the monitors that watch the application while it's running. See OC Systems' Web site for more information.

OC Systems Inc.
Phone: (703) 359-8160
Fax: (703) 359-8161
Web: www.ocsystems.com