We are in the process of enhancing and speeding up our build process, so we took the time to try out JRebel. I’m sure glad we did.
So what is JRebel? JRebel is a productivity tool for Java development. It eliminates the build and redeploy process from the development cycle. You can immediately see the changes in your application as soon as you change your code in your IDE. We can instantly see changes in classes inside libraries, web applications and enterprise applications with no extra step. Using Eclipse with auto build, we just save the source code and we can see our changes take effect. This is faster and easier than hot deployments. It also works for resource and configuration files.
JRebel supports popular frameworks like Spring and Hibernate. They also support web and application containers like Tomcat, JBoss and WebLogic.
The annual price is reasonable and it’s free for open source developers. I highly recommend it.