SAP Open Sources Memory Analysis

SAP has announced its first contribution to the Eclipse developer
community, previously only available in its NetWeaver stack. Memory
Analyzer, which was developed under the Eclipse Public License, is
intended to make life easier for developers building applications that
require lots of memory. Developers use the Eclipse Framework to create
applications and toolkits for Java and other programming languages.
The framework includes the open source, Java-based Eclipse integrated
development environment (IDE) on which SAP's NetWeaver is based. Other
competitive Java IDEs are also based on the Eclipse IDE, including
those from IBM's Rational, BEA, and Oracle among others who may now
also potentially benefit from this SAP contribution. SAP was an original
member of the Eclipse consortium, which began in 2001, and it was a
founding member of the Eclipse Foundation in 2004, so it's not
surprising it chose Eclipse to contribute to. Memory Analyzer provides
a graphics-based snapshot of object-retention patterns and provides
developers with the information they need to optimize memory usage
without interrupting the business applications in use or crashing the
Java virtual machine hosting the application. Michael Bechauf, vice
president of standards for SAP's Global Ecosystems and Partner Group,
said SAP held off on sharing the code until it was confident the
Eclipse environment was developed enough to support the needs of
large enterprise customers running multiple, high-volume applications
at the same time. A Memory Analyzer plug-in has been available for
download from SAP's Web site at no cost for more than a year.