Thursday, February 14, 2013

JMeter as a webapp

I've long felt that it might be a good idea to create a web-based controller for JMeter. JMeter has been and still is a good tool for performance testing. Its Swing-based UI, however, has always been a bit of an eyesore and IIRC a memory hog. The one interesting behavior it has, however, is "save on tab", ie any data you type is automatically saved when you tab out of the control. Of course, the save happens to memory, so you still have to Ctrl-s to actually save. And then there's the "feature" of saving any chosen node as a new file. Why, I'll never know.

Anyhoo, my idea is to create a webapp version of the JMeter UI. The possibilities are interesting:

  • Even a straight copy of the existing design should right away make a JMeter instance accessible via the intra/internet. Add features to actually kick off performance runs and you have a saucelabs equivalent for performance.
  • If instead we tweaked the UX a bit and actually model the Performance testing workflow (which, btw, the JMeter XML supports inherently), the result could be vastly better. Create the test run workbench separate from actual runs, show reports as a separate view instead of as attached nodes, and so forth.

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