TPTP

If you'd like to use the tptp package in Eclipse to profile your Java application, I'd advise not to bother, at least as of this writing. Try a commercial application if you can. I worked with tptp in various forms for a full day and I only ended up with a lot of disk space used up with useless plug-ins. I won't bother with every detail. I tried many different paths, and I know enough about these things that I really should have been able to configure and use this tool.

I did manage at one point to run the code analyzer, from the "all in one" download. But that's as close as I got. The "all in one" download doesn't run the server agent on it's own, you're on your own to figure out how to do this (or that it even exists, the profiler issues a blank error message). I got as far as figuring out that there is a configure script for the server, but the script will not run due to a problem detecting jaxp (I have jaxp of course, and I even placed files and new Java installs all over in hope it would see it with no luck). Not surprising, I had to do a huge amount of guessing.

As far as getting the various pieces of tptp to work by obtaining and configuring the plug-ins, there exist no usable step by step instructions for current software, in spite of some web pages that appear to be just that. What does exist is either old, or extraordinarily incomplete. I found this state highly unusual for an Eclipse project, and really shocking for something this complex.

I never did see the "profile as" option my run menus, and the profile icon I added to my toolbar is apparently permanently disabled. The agent program, which I don't even know for sure that I need, can not by run against any JRE I tried, which or without jaxp jars in the various lib
directories, and various environment settings (I was down to trying about anything). I have a valid set up, I use it everyday. But this stuff is looking for something very specific.

Perhaps tptp just doesn't work. But I suspect it does. There's simply far, far more information needed to do this than is online at the moment. I'm very hopeful that the tptp project will become usable at some point. I could sure use it. And there appears to be work being done on it. But with something as big and complex as it is, it's not practical to take the time to reverse engineer the entire thing, just to try it out. Disappointing...

Try jip. From Googling to runtime, it took me about a minute and a half to get basic profile output from jip, http://jiprof.sourceforge.net/