Performance by Design I — The Perfact Project
In a software development project the software architect already has an idea about the "Big Picture" at very early stages. Main parts of the system and their interaction can be identified using a component model. The idea of the Perfact project is to develop a tool, that allows the software architect to
proof his architectural concepts at a very early development stage. By deploying the architectural model in an application server it can be tested whether a dummy application behaves like expected. Performance is a major aspect of every software system, especially user-centered enterprise applications. Thus it should be addressed in the engineering process as early as possible. Yet performance considerations are usually not part of prevalent software development methodologies. Thus, in most cases it is the main goal to tune the performance in contrast to
design performance in the beginning.
Based on Eclipse 3.2 and the SAP Netweaver Developerstudio a
full featured toolchain to model architecture components and their interaction is provided.
The built-in Block Diagramm Editor allows the modelling of system components based on the
FMC Block Diagram scheme. The interaction of system components is modeled using the
UML Sequence Diagram scheme. Perfact Dummies are programmable software components based on EJB3, JMX, Web Services and many other technologies. For the simulation they are deployed on the new SAP Netweaver Web Application Server Java based on Java 5. This is one of the first application servers for JEE 5 certified by Sun.
In addition to the input from the chair two consecutive HPI Bachlor projects,
Perfact and
Perfact, too, consisting of 6 and 9 students each worked 6 month fulltime researching in this area. Meanwhile the second release of the
Perfact Tool is available.
Continue here...
