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SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Replay Solutions has introduced a public beta of its patented, software recording and replay technology for the enterprise Java applications market.
Replay, based in Redwood City, Calif., announced the beta of its ReplayDirector technology at the EclipseCon 2008 conference for Eclipse developers here on March 17.
In a meeting with eWEEK at Replay’s Redwood City headquarters, Replay CEO and co-founder Jonathan Lindo said that with more than four years of proven performance and quality assurance in video gaming software, Replay Director’s technology is now extended for Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE) applications to optimize software issue resolution across the application lifecycle.
ReplayDirector for Java EE is expected to ship in the second quarter of this year under Express, Team and Enterprise edition licenses for individual users, development and quality assurance teams, and production environments respectively, Lindo said.
Replay provides TiVo functionality for software developers.
In a demo, Lindo showed how ReplayDirector captures and reproduces an exact application execution. And with a standard debugger like Eclipse, it allows users to drill down into source code during replay to quickly identify the root cause of an issue. The technology will be on demonstration at EclipseCon.
Lindo said ReplayDirector can help development teams eliminate up to 80 percent of the time required to find and resolve application issues.
“Over the last four years, Replay Solutions has helped the world’s leading game creators develop and accelerate their titles to market with our technology,” Lindo said. “We’re excited to bring ReplayDirector to the Java EE market, which continues to be a dominant platform for enterprise applications. Our TiVo-like capabilities go far beyond just video, screen captures or parsing log files. By actually re-executing application code, we believe Replay offers a unique approach unlike any other in the industry.”
Lindo said he and co-founder and chief technology officer, Jeff Daudel, decided to start a company in late 2003/early 2004 after having worked together for a decade and experiencing “the real pains of software development throughout the lifecycle. We were experiencing so many acute pains going through that as developers that we said, ‘why can’t we be able to run a copy of what a customer sees on his machine when the problem occurs?'”
The Daudel developed a prototype of the technology they were looking for that could “go in and record any piece of software such that when you play the recording back you’re actually executing the code,” Lindo said.
The team then began to apply its solution to game software with such companies as Entertainment Arts, Microsoft, Eidos Interactive, and NVIDIA. Then in 2006 the company raised $4 million in venture backing from Hummer Winblad and Partech International.
With the ReplayDirector technology at work, application code continues running during replay, and recordings can be played anywhere, without requiring the original environment, databases or other servers. In addition, any standard tools can be used during Replay such as debuggers, profilers or memory leak detectors. And overhead is minimal, Lindo said. The technology is lightweight, with minimal performance impact and can run in production environments, he said.
“The developer interface is an Eclipse-based plug-in and that’s our target market,” Lindo said. He add, however, that “.Net is on the road map” for future platforms to support.
Lindo said interested users can register beginning today for a free trial version of ReplayDirector here. And more information about all ReplayDirector for Java EE solutions is available here.