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Web developers building applications on top of the various web services out there can get a better idea of performance from the Apache JMeter framework.

Apache JMeter has been around for a while. I can remember trying to get it working on Solaris 7 to test an application running on BEA's Weblogic 4.5.1.

JMeter worked very well then, and revealed some truly terrifying issues that needed to be addressed. I still feel a shiver of fear when I hear the words 'thread count' mentioned in public.

So it's with a tremble that I revisit the topic of JMeter, which has been addressed in admirable fashion on BEA's website by Dmitri Nevedrov on the topic of testing web services.

JMeter is listed within Apache's Jakarta project, and provides a performance-testing framework for developers to use in assessing how well the application works. A load testing option in JMeter can be invoked to simulate the effect of heavy traffic, perhaps that of a vigorous Digging or Slashdotting.

Nevedrov's article focuses on working with Weblogic, but the instructions provided should be sufficient to enable its use by web developers as a complementary tutorial for JMeter and other platforms like IBM's WebSphere.

In the load test example, Nevedrov shows how the response time rises as the thread count increases. He also verified the response coming from the server was a valid SOAP response and not a HTTP error.

"JMeter has HTTP, FTP, and LDAP samplers," Nevedrov wrote. "Creating these requests is a straightforward task and is well described in the JMeter manual; it usually involves creating a Thread Group, adding the sampler and the timer and the listener."

Database testing is an option with JMeter as well. A developer can use the JDBC Request element in JMeter, or creating a test as a script or Java class.

"Database and query tuning are particularly critical in applications dealing with large amounts of data, and, JMeter is a tool that is capable of providing some metrics in such evaluations," Nevedrov wrote.

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David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.