Although we don’t have a talk at QCon London we have registered a BOF on Thursday evening, which will be lead by Jevgeni Kabanov. We expect to finish it in the nearest pub, so feel free to join us and discuss what can be done to improve Java developer turnaround.

One topic that we want to discuss is creating an Open API for class reloading that can be taken advantage of by various open source frameworks. At the moment this role is filled by JavaRebel SDK, but perhaps with community input we could improve on it.

Thanks to an influx of users that we have gotten lately we have found and fixed a number of issues in JavaRebel. The following fixes went into both stable and development releases:

• JBoss support has been greatly improved, side-by-side SAR deployments are now supported
• GlassFish no longer crashes because of missing LogManager
• Fixed AbstractMethodError occuring in some cases
• Final fields now appear as final also through Reflection API

The following fix was considered more dangerous and went only to development release:

• Fixed a JavaRebel failure on a virtual and static method with same names and similar parameters.

We suggest to users of JBoss and GlassFish that had trouble before to try using the new release. Special thanks goes to Jürgen Denzel, who helped us identify and fix most of the issues.

We are working on 1.1-M2 that should be released next week, but since a lot of you use the 1.1-M1 release we decided to refresh that one as well.

Dear Java Community,

For some time we at ZeroTurnaround have been working on decreasing development turnaround time. Our flagship product, JavaRebel, has more or less solved the problem of reloading all changes made to Java code on-the-fly. However, this is not enough.

Java frameworks use configuration files, annotations and other methods to configure themselves. This is where JavaRebel loses its effect as configuration is always cached somewhere and usually not reloaded until the application is redeployed. This can be overcome by tighter integration with these frameworks.

With the release of JavaRebel 1.1 M1 we finally have full support for annotation reloading. We have also released an open source SDK that can be included in any open source project. The SDK will trigger registered listeners when the classes are reloaded allowing custom handling to occur. The integration is then just a matter of reloading configuration in development mode.

Using the annotation reloading and the SDK we have so far succeeded in integrating with Google Guice and Stripes Framework. Now almost all changes made to the applications using those frameworks are reloaded instantly. In addition to that Ignacio Coloma grabbed the SDK almost before its release and integrated the Loom web framework during the weekend. All three integrations took less than a day’s work.

It is our belief that providing such integration will greatly benefit the whole of the Java community. It is not unlikely that one day JavaRebel-like functionality will make it to the JVM and the users will be able to benefit from the integration without using a third-party product. Until then we invite you to help us define an open API for the class reloading and implement the integration for the framework you like, use or develop.

If you are a developer or a user of a Java framework of some sort and you would like to see the on-the-fly reloading in that framework happen you need to step up and make some noise in the community. We will continue investing into integration with frameworks, but we are limited by the frameworks that we know or our clients demand.

To facilitate the exchange of ideas and information we have setup a community mailing list and a Google Code project. Both framework developers and users are welcome to join and discuss what can be done to further improve Java development turnaround time.

To support this vision we are now giving free JavaRebel licenses to all open source developers.

Cheers,
ZeroTurnaround Team

This is a small bugfix release addressing the problems with Tomcat 6. Correct interpretation of the JSP Taglibrary descriptor, fixed JSP 2.0 SimpleTag handling and an upgraded XML parser. The new version is available from the download section.