Designing an Unobtrusive Analytics Framework for Monitoring Java Applications

In software development, attention has recently been placed on understanding users and their interactions with systems. User studies, practices such as A/B testing, and frameworks such as Google Analytics that gather data on production use have become common approaches in particular in the context of the Web, where it is easy to perform frequent updates as new needs emerge. However, when considering installable desktop applications, the situation gets more complex. While analytics facilities are still needed, they should address business logic, not generic traffic as is the case with many web sites. Moreover, analytics should be unobtrusive, and not have a high impact on the evolution of the actual application; thus, analytics should be treated as an add-on, as the target system may already exist. Finally, the instrumentation of features that are observed should be easy and flexible, but the provided mechanisms should be expressive enough for many use cases. In this paper, we examine different alternatives for implementing such monitoring mechanisms, and report results from an experiment with Vaadin, a web framework based on Java and Google Web Toolkit, GWT.