Before going into the details of JMeter, let us first understand a few jargons associated with the testing of any application.
- Performance Test − This test sets the best possible performance expectation under a given configuration of infrastructure. It also highlights early in the testing process if any changes need to be made before the application goes into production.
- Load Test − This test is basically used for testing the system under the top load it was designed to operate under.
- Stress Test − This test is an attempt to break the system by overwhelming its resources.
JMeter is a software that can perform load test, performance-oriented business (functional) test, regression test, etc., on different protocols or technologies.
Stefano Mazzocchi of the Apache Software Foundation was the original developer of JMeter. He wrote it primarily to test the performance of Apache JServ (now called as Apache Tomcat project). Apache later redesigned JMeter to enhance the GUI and to add functional testing capabilities.
JMeter is a Java desktop application with a graphical interface that uses the Swing graphical API. It can therefore run on any environment / workstation that accepts a Java virtual machine, for example − Windows, Linux, Mac, etc.
The protocols supported by JMeter are −
- Web − HTTP, HTTPS sites ‘web 1.0’ web 2.0 (ajax, flex and flex-ws-amf)
- Web Services − SOAP / XML-RPC
- Database via JDBC drivers
- Directory − LDAP
- Messaging Oriented service via JMS
- Service − POP3, IMAP, SMTP
- FTP Service