ZeroTurnaround today announced the release of JavaRebel 2.0, a JVM plugin that enables Java developers to see changes to their code immediately, without the need for application or container restarts.

Two weeks ago, JavaRebel 1.0 won a JOLT Productivity Award for its role in cutting development time and development team costs — recognition of the significant productivity gains that current customers are reporting. “We’re hearing that teams are saving an average of 10-40 minutes per developer, per day, in time otherwise wasted on application restarts”, said ZeroTurnaround marketing captain, David Booth, “Using time saved and developer salaries to calculate ROI, we’re talking about thousands of dollars in savings, per year, from each member of the team using JavaRebel in their development.” With JavaRebel 2.0’s expanded feature set, easy installation, and dramatically improved performance, ZeroTurnaround looks to build upon the success of the first version.

While the cost savings are beneficial in any economic climate, developers report results of another nature. “We’re hearing that the folks who used to look with envy at this feature in dynamic languages like Ruby and Python, are feeling much more comfortable with their Java applications now”, mentions ZeroTurnaround founder, Jevgeni Kabanov, “they’re enjoying the quick feedback and the incremental development techniques that flow naturally from a lightweight coding style like this.”

JavaRebel 2.0 supports:

• Changes to method bodies
• Changes to class structure, including adding methods, fields, constructors, changing/adding annotations, and changing interfaces
• Changes to configurations in Spring, Guice, Wicket, Stripes, Tapestry 4, and Struts2, with an open API for adding further support
• All major JVMs and containers
• Exploded and Unexploded Development practices – what does this mean?

ZeroTurnaround has priced JavaRebel 2.0 for the cost-conscious at 149USD per concurrent user, per annum. Based on customer feedback, they expect most firms will see the tool pay for itself within the first month of use, and offer a 30-day no-questions-asked money-back policy.

New and Noteworthy in JavaRebel 2.0
Download JavaRebel 2.0 Trial
www.zeroturnaround.com/javarebel

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About ZeroTurnaround
ZeroTurnaround is a trademark of a prominent Baltic company, Webmedia, Ltd. that focuses on improving developer productivity. Turnaround is the time it takes for the changes in code to propagate to a running application. It includes build time, deploy time and initialization time.

• Packaged deployment. We now support deployment as WAR/EAR with exactly the same feel that exploded development has. All the classes and resources will be reloaded on the fly as soon as you hit Save. All you have to do is create a rebel.xml configuration file that will tell JavaRebel where to find the updated classes and resources. On top of that we now provide a Maven plugin that will do this configuration for you!
• Very low performance overhead. The performance of the application with JavaRebel enabled is now pretty much the same as without JavaRebel.
• Better startup time. Application or server startup time should be much nearer to the usual one, though there still is more work to be done when starting with JavaRebel, so some slowdown is expected.
• Spring, Guice, Stripes, Tapestry 4 and Struts2 reload out of the box. Plugins for those frameworks are now included with JavaRebel and allow configuration to be changed instantly, just as classes.
• Better compatibility. We’ve done a whole lot of work on making JavaRebel more compatible with Java projects in the wild. This involved making sure that Reflection API behaves 100% predictably, extensive test suites in many environments and lot of integration work. In particular AspectJ load-time-weaving, IBM WebSphere and Groovy are now fully supported.

Last night, while “watching” JavaRebel win a JOLT productivity award on Twitter, I couldn’t help but think, “how wrong is it that I’m awake at 3:30am (Central European Time), hitting ‘refresh’ in firefox, again, and again, and again – and getting a sense of excitement out of doing it?”

And then I thought – hey – this must be something like using JavaRebel for development, without having to deal with application restarts, just coding in in a continuous flow of changes and refreshes.  I got to see the updates that were important to me in milliseconds, instead of minutes.  V.cool.

Of course, with JavaRebel 2.0 right around the corner, it will be interesting to see what effect winning this award has on the release.

Some questions:

1) Does the JOLT award carry any value with it?  Do you try a tool, because you see the award next to it on their site?

2) From JavaRebel customers, we’re hearing numbers like “JavaRebel saves 10-40 minutes, per developer, per day of development”.  Since 2.0 has an easier setup, and covers more situations where redeploying is necessary, how can we share this information, without sounding too “marketingy”?

Special Note: Thanks to Shashank Tiwari for sending us email updates, and offering to give an acceptance speech for us last night!  We really appreciate it!