How to write a plugin for JMeter
Introduction from Peter Lin
On more than one occasion, users have complained JMeter's developer documentation is out of
date and not very useful. In an effort to make it easier for developers, I decided to write a simple
step-by-step tutorial. When I mentioned this to mike, he had some ideas about what the tutorial
should cover.
Before we dive into the tutorial, I'd like to say writing a plugin isn't necessarily easy, even for
someone with several years of java experience. The first extension I wrote for JMeter was a
simple utility to parse HTTP access logs and produce requests in XML format. It wasn't really a
plugin, since it was a stand alone command line utility. My first real plugin for JMeter was the
webservice sampler. I was working on a .NET project and needed to stress test a webservice.
Most of the commercial tools out there for testing .NET webservices suck and cost too much.
Rather than fork over several hundred dollars for a lame testing tool, or a couple thousand dollars
for a good one, I decided it was easier and cheaper to write a plugin for JMeter.
After a two weeks of coding on my free time, I had a working prototype using Apache Soap driver.
I submitted it back to JMeter and mike asked me if I want to be a committer. I had contributed
patches to Jakarta JSTL and tomcat in the past, so I considered it an honor. Since then, I've
written the access log sampler, Tomcat 5 monitor and distribution graph. Mike has since then
improved the access log sampler tremendously and made it much more useful.
Introduction from Mike Stover
One of my primary goals in designing JMeter was to make it easy to write plugins to enhance as
many of JMeter's features as possible. Part of the benefit of being open-source is that a lot of
people could potentially lend their efforts to improve the application. I made a conscious decision
to sacrifice some simplicity in the code to make plugin writing a way of life for a JMeter developer.
While some folks have successfully dug straight into the code and made improvements to JMeter,
a real tutorial on how to do this has been lacking. I tried a long time ago to write some
documentation about it, but most people did not find it useful. Hopefully, with Peter's help, this
attempt will be more successful.
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