How to reduce your re-deployment time

Are you tired of always waiting for re-deployment whenever you change something during development?

I sure am! Recently it has even become worse, because my Enterprise JBoss Application Server takes around 4 minutes to boot, and it is not uncommon that I redeploy the application up to 20 - 30 times during one day.
That's already  80 - 120 minutes per day accumulated that I just have to wait for the application to start, and what's worse, many times I am in the flow, and really concentrated on the task at hand, then I have to redeploy, and I will unset my mind and start browsing some emails, forums, etc and totally loose my flow. It's hard to get back in that mindset again.

Wouldn't it be awesome that whenever you saved a change in your IDE, that it would instantly be picked up by the application server, and reloaded? Why do we need to reload the entire application each time? It doesn't make sense.


JRebel to the rescue!


I have known about JRebel for some time, and I knew about its awesomeness. However, when I tried to install it a few years back, it was really tedious and error prone, and I couldn't really get it working correctly. But recently JRebel has been shipped with a new configuration wizard which basically does everything for you. It took next to no time to install it and get it working, and already it is saving me a lot of time. 

JRebel is just awesome, and every Java developer should (read must) use it!