My Java World: DCEVM - A JRebel free alternative

My Java World: DCEVM - A JRebel free alternative

Those of you who work with web application development on a daily basis know very well that application reloading or server restarting is annoying. With Tomcat and Eclipse for example, when you make just a small change in your Java class, it still takes at least a few seconds for the change to be reflected because the whole web app will need to be reloaded. Other IDEs even require you to restart the server. This is because class hot-swapping in the JVM is severely limited. Only method body changes can be hot-replaced. All other changes (method signature, class members, etc) will require reloading the whole application.

If you work for a company that buys you a commercial hot-swap solution, like JRebel, you're lucky because usually they work out of the box and offer more functionalities. But if not, don't worry, there are free alternatives out there (DCEVM, FakeReplace, Spring-loaded...). I haven't tried them all, but it looks like DCEVM is the most advanced one and yet requires minimal configurations. 

Update June 2016: DCEVM seems to be going strong, the fork I mentioned before has been well maintained, JRE 1.8 support has been added and now there is even support for framework configuration files hot-swapping, which effectively bring DCEVM closer than ever to JRebel in terms of feature set. Check out www.hotswapagent.org if you haven't, there you should find everything you need to get started. IDE specific instructions can be found here: https://github.com/HotswapProjects/HotswapAgent/wiki If all is well you can ignore the rest of this article, hurrahhh!

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