AT&T Application Resource Analyzer in NetBeans IDE
- by Geertjan
Here at Øredev in Malmö I met Doug Sillars who does developer outreach for the AT&T Application Resource Optimizer. In this YouTube clip you see Doug explaining how it works and what it can do for optimizing performance of mobile applications.
There's a free and open source Android app on GitHub that you can install on Android to collect data and then there's a Java Swing application for analyzing the results. And here's what that application looks like as a plugin in NetBeans IDE, click to enlarge the image, which shows the Android sources of the Data Collector, as well as the Data Analyzer ready to be used to collect data:
Since the ARO Data Analyzer is written in Java and has JPanels defining its UI layer, integrating the user interface wasn't hard. Now working on the Actions, so there'll be a new ARO menu with start/stop data collecting menu items, etc, reusing as much of the original code as possible. That part is actually already working. I started up an Android emulator, then started the data collection process from the IDE. Now need to include the Actions for importing the data into the analyzer, together with a few other related features. A pretty cool feature in ARO is video capture, so that a movie can be made by ARO of all the steps taken on the device during the collection process, which will also be nice to have integrated into the NetBeans plugin.
Ultimately, this will be handy for anyone creating Android applications in NetBeans IDE since they'll be able to use AT&T's ARO tool for optimizing the performance of the applications they're developing. It will also be useful for those using the built-in Cordova tools in NetBeans IDE to create iOS applications because ARO is also applicable to analyzing iOS application performance.
