I pushed up a new theme design here on the site, using all the fun bells and whistles of SASS with Compass, some nice typography in Raleway courtesy of Google Web Fonts, and much more. And if you’re wondering how I did that crazy pure-CSS zigzag drop on the top there, you can check out the source from my GitHub repo.
Apache JMeter: Part 3 – Hacking JMeter to Customize the Listening Port on the Client
By default, there’s no way to set which port that the Apache JMeter client (master) listens on for the response of a test – and it always uses a random port instead! That means you have to open up your firewall on ports 45000-70000 to run it, which sucks. It’s easy enough to patch, though! Below, you can download my patched source to build your own copy:
If you are using a newer version of JMeter than 2.4 (the latest, as of the time of writing this), directions follow for which files probably need to be updated. If you’ve never built JMeter or a Java application from source, you are also in luck, as all the gory details are here, too! Continue reading
Apache JMeter: Part 2 – Remote Testing Configuration
Let’s say you’ve already gotten through the basics of JMeter and you’re ready to start setting up your testing. If you’re doing any sort of remote testing, you’ll inevitably need to know how to setup your client/server relationships. Continue reading
Apache JMeter: Part 1 – The Basics
Recently, I’ve been doing a bit of load testing on Amazon AWS to determine how much abuse our web application can take without killing the server. I’ve been attempting to use Apache JMeter to do the hard part, but came up against a slew of problems. The documentation provided seems targetted at dyed-in-the-wool Java developers (that “J” at the beginning is clearly a warning shot), and makes pretty big assumptions about the knowledge of the audience. Here are the basic concepts of how to get started using it, targeted for us LAMP developers.
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Defensive Programming
As a web developer, the greater part of my job is not creating new apps, but hacking together disparate software packages into Frankensteinian amalgamations that (supposedly) work together seamlessly. This is universally a headache, as the original authors tend to write code thinking that their app is the only one that will be installed. WordPress, Vanilla, and Interspire’s Email Marketer are some of the worst offenders that I struggle with regularly.
When coding your own brilliant application, there are a few simple things you can do to avoid potential collisions and headaches later, especially if anyone else will be using your code. Here are a few areas to pay attention to. Continue reading