Tools

These are handy tools for your Development Environment.

Netbeans Connector Chrome Extension

The Netbeans Connector extension for Chrome allows you to see changes you’ve made to HTML pages the moment you save the file without having to refresh your browser. See also http://wiki.netbeans.org/ChromeExtensionInstallation

Maven

With Maven installed you can run mvn package and mvn test from the command line. It can be downloaded from https://maven.apache.org

Eclipse Memory Analyzer Tool (MAT)

The Memory Analyzer Tool (MAT) from Eclipse can help you analyze heap dumps, showing you “leak suspects” such as seen at https://github.com/payara/Payara/issues/350#issuecomment-115262625

It can be downloaded from http://www.eclipse.org/mat

If the heap dump provided to you was created with gcore (such as with gcore -o /tmp/gf.core $glassfish_pid) rather than jmap, you will need to convert the file before you can open it in MAT. Using gf.core.13849 as example of the original 33 GB file, here is how you could convert it into a 26 GB gf.core.13849.hprof file. Please note that this operation took almost 90 minutes:

/usr/java7/bin/jmap -dump:format=b,file=gf.core.13849.hprof /usr/java7/bin/java gf.core.13849

A file of this size may not “just work” in MAT. When you attempt to open it you may see something like “An internal error occurred during: “Parsing heap dump from ‘/tmp/heapdumps/gf.core.13849.hprof’”. Java heap space”. If so, you will need to increase the memory allocated to MAT. On Mac OS X, this can be done by editing MemoryAnalyzer.app/Contents/MacOS/MemoryAnalyzer.ini and increasing the value “-Xmx1024m” until it’s high enough to open the file. See also http://wiki.eclipse.org/index.php/MemoryAnalyzer/FAQ#Out_of_Memory_Error_while_Running_the_Memory_Analyzer

PageKite

PageKite is a fantastic service that can be used to share your local development environment over the Internet on a public IP address.

With PageKite running on your laptop, the world can access a URL such as http://pdurbin.pagekite.me to see what you see at http://localhost:8080

Sign up at https://pagekite.net and follow the installation instructions or simply download https://pagekite.net/pk/pagekite.py

The first time you run ./pagekite.py a file at ~/.pagekite.rc will be created. You can edit this file to configure PageKite to serve up port 8080 (the default GlassFish HTTP port) or the port of your choosing.

According to https://pagekite.net/support/free-for-foss/ PageKite (very generously!) offers free accounts to developers writing software the meets http://opensource.org/docs/definition.php such as Dataverse.

Vagrant

Vagrant allows you to spin up a virtual machine running Dataverse on your development workstation.

From the root of the git repo, run vagrant up and eventually you should be able to reach an installation of Dataverse at http://localhost:8888 (or whatever forwarded_port indicates in the Vagrantfile)

The Vagrant environment can also be used for Shibboleth testing in conjunction with PageKite configured like this:

service_on = http:@kitename : localhost:8888 : @kitesecret

service_on = https:@kitename : localhost:9999 : @kitesecret

Please note that before running vagrant up for the first time, you’ll need to ensure that required software (GlassFish, Solr, etc.) is available within Vagrant. If you type cd downloads and ./download.sh the software should be properly downloaded.

MSV

MSV (Multi Schema Validator) can be used from the command line to validate an XML document against a schema. Download the latest version from https://java.net/downloads/msv/releases/ (msv.20090415.zip as of this writing), extract it, and run it like this:

$ java -jar /tmp/msv-20090415/msv.jar Version2-0.xsd ddi.xml
start parsing a grammar.
validating ddi.xml
the document is valid.