Since we are running a few days behind on our release schedule, I updated the beta build with one that expires on April 21.

This update contains a ton of bugfixes. Stack view is much faster now, and shouldnt lag when there are lots of threads at a point in time.
Also errors related to 'method too large' to instrument are now gone. We just skip over and exclude methods that are too large.

I advice everyone to upgrade.

The Chronon beta launch has blown past our wildest expectations!

We got on the front page of :

• Hacker News
• Reddit - Programming
• Javalobby
• EclipseZone
• TheServerSide

We were talked about in the Java Posse podcast.

We joined the Eclipse Foundation.
We couldn’t have developed Chronon without the maturity of the Eclipse platform, as we are excited to officially join as a member.

We won the first ever EclipseCon new products Showcase!
Chronon won the first "Eclipse Hot New Products Showcase", held during EclipseCon 2011. The new product showcase award is given to the hottest Eclipse-based product, as voted by EclipseCon attendees, built or released in the last year. It was humbling to see the community support for Chronon, as we faced 20 other, much bigger competitors. 

The backstory:

I remember talking to my business partner before the beta launch and since we didnt have much of a budget for marketing, we thought if we could get just 100 users for the beta, for a till then unknown product, we would consider it a success. Of course we shot way, way past that number within hours! In <12 hours of the launch we were on the front page of reddit and hacker news. I personally was on a flight to India during this and on my stop at Dubai to catch the connecting flight, I remember opening up my laptop and seeing all this crazy traffic on our website, bringing our server to its knees. I remember frantically calling one of my partners from the airport, on international roaming, to immediately upgrade the server. Overnight success feels awesome, especially if you have been working on it for over 4 years.

Since then we have been updating and polishing the beta based on the immense feedback we have gotten. We have also been updating and maintaining our documentation as we go along. Although we are not an open-source product, we like to be completely transparent on what is going on behind the scenes in Chronon. We believe that is more useful than just dumping a pile of source code which few would bother to read. For that purpose we have been updating this blog with the technical details and design decisions of Chronon and will continue to do so.

We are now just days away from the full release of Chronon. If you still havent tried Chronon, please download it from here.

I will end this post with just a few of the tweets from our users:

Yet another update posted for Chronon with some more bug fixes and polish.

We have posted another update to the beta.

This release contains minor bugfixes and of course, some of the features we talked about previously.

More importantly we have increased the expiry date to April 1.

We have just released an update to the Chronon beta.
This update contains a lot of bugfixes and resolves a lot of severe crashing issues.
We recommend everybody to upgrade your Chronon installation.

We have also increased the beta expiry from March 15 to March 25th.

Please note that recordings made from previous beta are incompatible with this beta release.  

So today we finally made the long awaited Chronon beta open to all.

Since this is an engineering blog, I aim to clarify who the beta is meant for and under what scenarios it should be used.

The current beta is meant for internal use strictly. We would love for you to try it out in scenarios like development, support, QA, etc. However we do not see this release as being used in production level scenarios where performance is an extremely high level priority.

This is a beta in the true sense that we really want you to evaluate the robustness of the recorder and the time travelling debugger.  We want to hear from you if the recorder crashes under some circumstances or the level of performance you would like it to reach. Similarly for the time travelling debugger, we really want to hear your opinion on whether it helps you find root causes of bugs faster than a traditional debugger.

Keep in mind, 'beta' means things will be a little incomplete and sharp around the edges. For one, we the current eclipse plugin doesnt have great J2EE integration (will be there in final release). 

Even though we have tried to keep the UI of the debugger familiar to that of the traditional debugger, when you are in hardcore debugging mode you will realize how different it actually is. We know that this new UI will cause some surprises for the new users. Thus we have added a bunch of videos showcasing some scenarios how Chronon should be used. This blog will also be updating very frequently from now onwards to tell you about all our design decisions and have a nice discussion with everyone before we reach the final 1.0 release.