Imaging Experts

Looking Back at the Last 10 Years

It seems like only yesterday we were opening the doors of Snowbound Software and releasing our imaging SDK. And now in February, thanks to all our customers and our dedicated team of employees and partners, Snowbound will be celebrating its 10th anniversary.

We started Snowbound with three core goals that we felt were important to succeeding as an imaging products company:

• Develop close relationships with our customers
• Create solid, powerful products built on a reliable code-base
• Form a team of people who are passionate about and experts in imaging
  

Listening to our customers assured our success. The relationships we formed over the years with our customers have provided us with valuable feedback that has enabled us to continually enhance our offerings and become our industry’s leading provider of imaging technology. By applying our expertise in imaging to our customers’ industries, we have been, and are still, able to develop solutions powerful enough to meet their most critical and timely performance and feature requirements.

Our solutions spring from a base technology that is not only powerful but flexible and, very importantly, designed to be cross-platform. Maintaining one code-base allows us to quickly add new features and functions into all our products — and platforms — close to simultaneously while ensuring version compatibility when customers upgrade.

We were able to reach our first two goals by hiring people that are both passionate about imaging and dedicated to our customers' needs. From management, to our engineers and support, to our sales team, everyone at Snowbound has the passion and expertise that insures we remain an industry-leading imaging technology company.

This passion and dedication, along with your valuable input, will fuel our company’s growth for the next ten years. Thank you for helping us to reach this milestone. We look forward to many more years of dialog, innovation and success.

Another historical tidbit, one question I get repeatedly is how we got our name. The preliminary meetings for founding Snowbound were conducted in January of 1996. That winter was the worst winter in Boston’s history. Almost every day we had to fight the snow to get to our planning meetings. When deciding on a name that would be distinctive and memorable, our feelings of being “snowbound” helped us decide. And the rest is history!

-Simon

JMeter for Stress Testing Web Applications

When it's time to deploy your web application in the real world, it's a good idea to simulate the amount of the traffic that your server is expected to support. It's not really possible to coordinate all of your co-workers to click "OK" all at the same time, so luckily, there are some software tools out there that can do this for you.

The backbone in most load testing applications, is the "script", or list of server commands that need to be sent from multiple "virtual users" at the same time, or close to the same time. Each virtual user theoretically represents one actual user, so it is important to try to model a real world situation.

I've recently done some research on stress testing applications. A lot of larger companies use LoadRunner, which seems to be the industry leader. After seeing this product in action, it is indeed very powerful, but it is very expensive.

JMeter, a product provided by the Apache Jakarta Project, might be just as good as LoadRunner, and instead of $20,000, it's free.

Both of these tools have features that automatically record a user's action, and extract out the server calls, to create the script. In JMeter, the recording is performed through it's HTTP Proxy feature. Once the proxy server is set up, you configure your Web Browser to point to this proxy, this way, all of the web-browser's requests are routed through the proxy for recording.

Once the recording is done, you now have the basis for your load test script. You can set up hundreds of users to make the same server calls you did when you were using the browser.

-Alex

Eclipse is Gaining Popularity

I've been using Eclipse as an IDE since early 2004 now. It seems to be really catching on. A supplement in SD Times recently had an article on its increasing popularity in the entire software development community, not just Java. 

"62.5 percent of software development managers reported that some or all of their developers use Eclipse--an increase from 53.9 percent a year earlier."

Most of the Java developers at Snowbound are now using Eclipse.

Here are some of the benefits:

• An extensive plugin interface that allows third party tools to be easily integrated. For example, When I want to do some performance testing, all I have to do is run my project using  "Profile"  menu that was added when I installed JProfiler on my machine. When I choose to run my application in this way, JProfiler is automatically launched. By the way, JProfiler is an excellent tool for performance tuning. It pays for itself after only a couple of sessions.

• A lot of previously tedious tasks are done for you. Import statements at the top of a Java class can be automatically neatly organized. Getter / Setter Methods can be automatically generated. Required methods of implemented interfaces are automatically stubbed for you.

• I can define my preferred formatted and coloring / or bolding of code. Member variables can be bold, static constants can be gold, etc. Everything is indented exactly how I want in a single keystoke.

Eclipse's annual exhibition, EclipseWorld, will be held in Cambridge in September 06.

-Alex