So, after enduring some abuse from colleagues who miss VisualStudio (I have to admit – that feature to move the program counter does look really cool) I spent a bit of time the other day setting up with a trail-run of JRebel. So far the experience has been pretty fantastic – I can use maven to jetty:run a project, hit ctrl+F9 to recompile, and F5 in the browser and see changes reflected – even with changed method sigs and the other goodies. It’s nice for test run, though I do admit, it makes it harder for me to force myself to write unit tests (not necessarily good)
I started with a couple internet tutorials:
- http://raibledesigns.com/rd/entry/using_jrebel_with_intellij_idea
- http://www.zeroturnaround.com/jrebel/configuration/maven/
One oddity I had to workaround w/hard coded paths – in Ubuntu I setup /etc/environment with refs to the JREBEL_HOME and to add it to MAVEN_OPTS, but when I run from IntelliJ it doesn’t seem to do the variable substitution, I get errors about not being able to run $JREBEL_HOME as a class – for the time being have just hard-coded paths and moved on, and it’s been great.