The Jolt Awards finalists have been announced and JavaRebel is shortlisted in the Utilities category. We’ll keep our fingers crossed to win and join such great products as VmWare Workstation that won the previous year award.
About the Jolt Awards: Software development has grown from an elite set of tools that everyone knew about and used, to today’s prolific industry awash with hundreds of products that morph and evolve with such swiftness and complexity that it is virtually impossible for developers to keep up with the changing market. Which products should they continue to use? Which upgrades and new versions are worthwhile? Which new tools’ performance and usability far outstrip their competitors? What is the new killer app? Enter the Jolt Product Excellence Awards: We recognize the most innovative, trend-making, ahead-of-the-curve products. Jolt-award winners are the software products, books and technologies that developers should be using today.
And to celebrate the occasion we released a small update to the 2.0-M1 release with more than 10 issues fixed. Read the changes or download now.
Enjoy the holidays!
Devoxx is an annual European Java conference with a total of 3200 attendees from 35 countries and again has been completely sold out. This is also the last conference this year that ZeroTurnaround will be present at.
It has been a very busy year for us, visiting Jax.de, JavaONE, Great Indian Developer Summit, TSS Europe, Oracle World, JavaZone, JAOO, QCon SF and finally we are at the last event of 2008.
Our booth will be open in the exhibition area from December the 9th till December the 11th. If you want to see a demo of JavaRebel, sneak a peek at what is coming up next or just say hello be sure to drop by.
Jevgeni Kabanov, JavaRebel Lead, will present a talk Zero Turnaround in Java Development on 11th of December at 17:50-18:50 in room 7. This is a great opportunity to learn about different options for speeding up Java development.
See you at Devoxx.
Christmas sale for ZeroTurnaround products has started and will last till 4th of January 2009. Everything is 40% off. This means personal/commercial perpetual/yearly licenses and for both JavaRebel and JSP Weaver. See the exact prices from the buy page.
This is a great opportunity to equip your team with the latest in Java technology and start saving time and money today.
It is our great pleasure to present the first milestone of the 2.0 release. It includes numerous changes, both visible and under the hood, with yet more to come in the next milestones. Download it now or read the changes below.
The major themes of this release were:
- Startup time and performance overhead.
We have optimized or otherwise eliminated most of the bottlenecks that made the previous versions slow for some of our users. For this release we mainly focused on the runtime performance overhead, which has been decreased more than an order of magnitude and should be negligible in most cases. This should also directly affect the long startup time, as it was often caused by prolonged initialization routines in the previous versions.
- Compatibility.
Compatibility was a strong concern for this release. We have devoted a lot of time to tweak reflection and annotations support as well as integration with specific frameworks. We also compiled an extensive test suite that should make JavaRebel work out of the box for most users.
- Embedded plugins: Spring and Guice.
We now support distributing the plugins along with JavaRebel instead of downloading and installing them separately. With this release we have included Spring and Guice, so you should be able to load new components and dependencies without redeploying. More plugins will be included as they are stabilized or contributed.
- Virtual classpath.
Another concern for many of our users is configuring the existing build/deploy environment to make use of JavaRebel class reloading. Not everyone can use the exploded development and -Drebel.dirs has limitations in support of new classes and resource propagation.
That’s why we implemented something we call a virtual classpath. The -Drebel.path property behaves similar to the -Drebel.dirs, except that instead of directories you can add WARs directly, with EARs and more advanced options coming soon. Virtual classpath will also propagate new classes and update your resources, like HTML or JSP files. It does require some extra configuration so take a look at the configuration manual.
NB! Virtual classpath is only supported on Tomcat, Jetty and WebLogic containers in this release.
- Improved API.
Besides the embeddable plugins we also now support third-party instrumentation. This will allow us to support e.g. AspectJ load-time weaving. Unfortunately the plugin itself didn’t make it into this release, but since the required infrastructure is now in place we can release it retroactively as a plugin.
A minor update to the stable branch that fixes a couple of issues that were reported since the previous release. It also adds support for JBoss 5. Check the changes or download it right away.
We are proud to announce specialized support for four new frameworks. The following plugins are now available at the JavaRebel plugins page:
In addition to that Attila Szegedi has included support for JavaRebel in the next release of Freemarker (announcement). The project will join Loom and others to depend on the open source JavaRebel SDK and react to class reloads to invalidate internal cache.
Although this month the ZeroTurnaround Team participates in three conferences (JavaZone, OracleWorld and JAOO) we try to also keep up with our release schedule. Thus we are very proud to present not one, but two simultaneous releases:
- JavaRebel release includes mostly fixes to the 1.2 branch, but also features installation instructions for the Spring Application Platform. The most notorious issues fixed were the ones causing Java 1.4 users a ExceptionInInitializerError on startup and IBM WebSphere users a StackOverflowError. If you were hit by those issues you should try again with this release. See changelog or download.
- The Spring plugin release includes fixes and performance improvements. The plugin will no longer rescan all XML files on every web request and the introduced delay should now be measured in milliseconds. A number of problems with Spring Security has been fixed and it should now work without any issues. See changelog or download.
Since we started selling JavaRebel we had quite a few high-profile customers and quite a few large sales. However this is one of the first that combines the two.
LinkedIn, Corp. has purchased JavaRebel licenses for all its Java engineers to use in the well-known social networking website development. The website, written almost exclusively in Java, can now be updated on-the-fly in development, boosting the LinkedIn engineer productivity. We asked LinkedIn to comment and got the following reply from one of the engineers:
I’ve been using JavaRebel regularly for some time now and it’s done a lot to help developer productivity. Because of our unique situation with build/deploy times I can easily say that I’ve saved many hours spent needlessly waiting for a an app to deploy. It’s great for bug fixing or anytime when you may need to make several consecutive tweaks to the code.
That being said JavaRebel is no silver bullet and can start to act wonky sometimes (while making normal compatible changes). I’m not sure what the causes are but at times it seems like JavaRebel gets out of sync with the built classes. Developers need to keep in mind that that there are limits to what kind of changes can be made and there are times when you may need to redeploy your app and or restart your app container.
Overall I’d highly recommend it to anyone where deploy/redeploy to app containers is part of their workflow.
About LinkedIn:
LinkedIn takes your personal business network online, giving you access to people, jobs and opportunities like never before. Built upon trusted connections and relationships, LinkedIn has established the world’s largest and most powerful business network. Currently, more than 23 million professionals are on LinkedIn, representing all five hundred of the Fortune 500 companies, as well as a wide range of household names in technology, financial services, media, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, fashion, and numerous other industries.
The latest stable release of the JavaRebel code reloading agent includes a plugin for Spring that reloads Spring configuration on-the-fly boosting development productivity even more. See the screencast and download JavaRebel and the plugin.
For this stable JavaRebel release we have focused on two main themes: stability and extensibility. This includes the following changes from 1.1:
- Reworked core. Thanks to the numerous enhancements to the core JavaRebel can now handle any esoteric code or container there is.
- Reworked SDK. Thanks to the new API and configuration you can now make any part of your application or library code reloadable, no matter where or how is it located. SDK is available as open-source.
- JavaRebel plugins. It is now easy to support custom classloaders, containers and frameworks by registering a simple Plugin. Open-source example plugin, plugin development howto and a discussion mailing list are available at ZeroTurnaround Community.
- Equinox OSGi container, IBM WebSphere and Atlassian Confluence plugins are now supported
See the full list of changes or just download JavaRebel now.
In addition to that we have released a JavaRebel plugin for Spring that allows reloading/reinjecting Spring dependencies on-the-fly without reloading the bean factory or application context. We have prepared a screencast that demonstrates the Spring plugin features. See the plugin installation manual for more details or just download it.
Now that the infrastructure is in place we plan to provide more plugins for the most popular frameworks that enable seamless zero turnaround even when updating configuration or other resources. You are welcome to join our community and contribute a plugin for your favorite framework or platform.
