JavaRebel is a JVM plugin (-javaagent) that enables reloading changes made to Java class files on-the-fly, saving developers the time that it takes to redeploy an application or perform a container restart. It is a generic solution that works for Java EE and Java standalone applications.

It is our greatest pleasure to announce the immediate availability of JavaRebel 1.1 final release! The release is a result of more than 6 months of work from the ZeroTurnaround team and includes the following changes in comparison to 1.0.x:

• Unexploded development. Now you can run JavaRebel without having to change your build cycle in the least. See the installation manual and this article.
• Improved debugging. No need to step through generated methods anymore, see this article.
• Full reflection support. All changes to methods, fields and annotations will show up also via Reflection API.
• Dynamic proxy support. Support for JDK, CGLib and Javassist dynamic proxies allows to add methods to classes behind proxies.
• Full support for Java 1.4. All of the features available in Java 5 are also available in Java 1.4. The installation is also now simpler and supports more containers. See installation manual for details.
• JavaRebel SDK. With the SDK you have full access to the JavaRebel API and can use it for custom integration or to enable configuration reloading. The community site includes additional support for Google Guice, Stripes and Commons-EL.

To celebrate this release and to prove that 1.1 is stable we will give one free unrestricted personal license for any issue that you help us fix until 1st June. The campaign rules follow:

• Bug reports must be registered on our support forum.
• We must be able to fix the bug from your reports and it must require a code change, not just configuration change.
• All bug reports filed before 1st June (including currently open ones) are eligible even if the issue is fixed later.
• Duplicate bug reports will receive a free license at our discretion, if we think that the new information helped us fix the bug.

To receive the license send an e-mail to support at zeroturnaround dot com with a link to your bug report and this announcement.

Watch the demonstration screencast (~2 mins), read the feature list or download JavaRebel from ZeroTurnaround.com and give it a try. JavaRebel is commercial software with a free trial for 21 days and developer seat cost at 149$.

JavaRebel 1.1-RC2 includes just a few minor fixes, download it now. We expect to release JavaRebel 1.1 GA on Wednesday, so stay tuned.

We are great fans of Scala and Lift and are glad to support the first official community gettogether. Scala LiftOFF takes place one day after the end of JavaOne at 301 Battery Street, Third Floor in San Francisco on Saturday May 10th. We sincerely advice everyone in the San Francisco area at the time to come to this one-day unconference even if you haven’t played with Scala yet. You won’t regret it!

The first release candidate for the 1.1 version is available for download. The main addition to the previous version is greatly expanded support for Java 1.4. Now installation is same for all containers and supports everything that was supported under Java 5. There are also no longer any restrictions in reflection support and so on. Check out the updated installation manual for details.

This year you can see the ZeroTurnaround booth at a lot of developer ventures. For a start we welcome all JavaRebel current and future users to Wiesbaden on 21st to 25th April and San Francisco on 6th to 9th May. Two main JavaRebel developers will be manning the booth, so if you have any questions or suggestions it’s a great place to let us know.

The latest development version of JavaRebel features two most requested improvements:

1. You can now develop with unexploded WAR/EAR/JAR, while still compiling instantly with your IDE. To do that just set the “-Drebel.dirs=/path/to/classes1,/path/to/classes2,…” JVM command line property and JavaRebel will load the “.class” files from those directories instead of from EAR/WAR. The disadvantage in this solution is that since newly added classes are not present in the classpath, JavaRebel will not see them before you recompile your WAR/EAR/JAR (which may still not work in some containers).
2. You can now mark JARs as reloadable (either set “JavaRebel-Reloadable: true” in MANIFEST.MF or make the JAR name end in “-reloadable.jar”). Reloadable JARs will be monitored for changes and classes in them reloaded as usual. This way you can use your usual build cycle instead of IDE building. Note that you still need unexploaded WAR/EAR, just classes may be in JARs. This feature is considered experimental and is first of all meant for production support in future versions of JavaRebel.

For other changes see the changelog or just download now and try it out!