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 -----------