I’ve always been a fan of virtualising my development environment; nothing quite like carrying around a 220Gb disk image of Windows 2003 + SAP R/3 and writing a new SAP connector when you’re on the road. Recently though, I’ve been getting less than stellar performance from vmplayer / vmserver; so I wanted to switch to a Type 1 hypervisor…

As it happens, due to various reasons (I say various, but I mean one reason) I have inherited a couple of laptops, all with broken screens; other than the broken screens they’re perfectly servicable, and yet not worth refurbishing. They’re both Core 2 Duo (T7250 or better)with 4 GB RAM and 250Gb hard drives; which should be more than adequate to run a Type-1 hypervisor; they have Intel-VT and all that. I’m trying to find out if I could install ESXi onto these laptops; shall we just say that there’s a dearth of information on the VMWare site about compatibility with laptop models, so I’m left with one choice, Hyper-V from Microsoft. Why didn’t I just try and install ESXi? I could have; we’re in the process of virtualising all our servers using VMWare already, so obviously there’s a wealth of knowledge inhouse I can tap up, but that wouldn’t have been interesting.

What’s the most important thing when performance tuning the adapter; it’s information, having a gut feeling about where the adapter is slow is all well and good, but you’ll need to prove it. After all premature optimization is the root of all evil.

In addition to having Perf4J (http://perf4j.codehaus.org) annotations on Workflows, and Producers (which can be enabled using aspectj AOP); 2.7.1 introduced the a new service Perf4jTimingService that can wrap any arbitrary service and gather performance metrics about that service’s throughput.

Let’s take a look at some of the features that are available in the Adapter; today we’re going focus on scripting language support.

For a while now (since 2.7.0) you’ve been able to embed a script (using any JSR223 scripting language) as part of a service. You can either use EmbeddedScriptingService (where the script is inline in the XML) or ScriptingService (where you refer to the filename containing the script).