[jboss-dev] Byteman 1.3.0 release now available

[Andrew Dinn]

Byteman 1.3.0 has been released and is now available at the project 
download page or from the JBoss maven repository. The release contains 
several new features and about a dozen bug fixes. It also includes the 
first byteman user contrib package, dtest.

dtest is a tool contributed by JBossTS project lead Jonathan Halliday 
which uses Byteman to instrument and validate execution of distributed 
test programs.

New features added in release 1.3.0 include:

* lifecycle events for rules and helper classes.

the byteman agent will automatically invoke setup and tear down 
operations when individual rules or rule sets are loaded and unloaded. 
this is particularly useful when performance monitoring rule sets are 
dynamically loaded into and unloaded from a long-running application 
(e.g. JBoss AS). It allows auxiliary threads to be started and stopped 
automatically, ports for dumping data to be opened and closed cleanly, etc.

* several new special variables which allow rules to access extra 
trigger method state.

For example, a rule with location
   AT CALL myMethod
which gets triggered just before the trigger method invokes myMethod can 
reference $@ an Object[] holding the target object and call parameters.

* location specifiers with the new AT . . . ALL syntax.

AT . . . ALL locations specify injection at all matching locations. Sof 
example,
   AT READ myField ALL
will cause the rule to be triggered at every point in the target method 
where field myField is read.

* many new methods added to the built-in Helper class.

In particular these include support for querying, formatting and 
printing the call stack. For example, a rule condition such as
   IF callerEquals("MyClass.myCaller true)
can be used to ensure that the rule only fires when the target method is 
called from method myCaller of class MyClass.

More details are available from the project blog. Full details provided 
in the programmer's guide.

regards,


Andrew Dinn
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