I work in Grails, a Java-based framework that supports hot code reloading with Spring-loaded. Spring-loaded, unfortunately, lives up to its promise about 40% of the time. Modifying a service with inheritance? Fat chance. Changing static methods on a bean? Good luck! The dependent beans won't get updated. JRebel handles all these situations gracefully and just blows Spring-loaded out of the water. JRebel's support is extremely responsive and follows up to make sure an issue is resolved. The kids of death for developers is downtime during development; JRebel's hot reloading stops the waiting and distraction of restarting the server away. Theme product pays for itself many times over by saving costly developer time. JRebel is also super easy to install, with IDE plugins for many popular editors.

The only issue we've had with JRebel was in a multi-project Gradle build where it didn't automatically pick up changes to dependent modules. In this case, we had to manually recompile a changed file and then JRebel picked it up right away. Not too much of an issue.

Going JRebel for us was great. It improved the productivity in so many ways (they even have reports that calculate how much money you save by avoiding redeployments).

When I first learned that there is a way to remove the redeployment of a Java application for almost any change you do in the code, I said: finally, save us from this nightmare. Not needing to redeploy has so many implications like: - saves development time - keeps the developer focused on the task at hand - removes the "context switching" issue (when the developer focuses on something else while redeploying the app) - improves productivity - reduces team members' frustration

The license manager's User Interface is difficult to use. We have a combination of floating and dedicated user licenses and managing these is not intuitive, especially if you have often people joining and leaving the team and you need to assign/reassign licenses.

We use JRebel in our everyday development and it has definitely improved teams' productivity.

This tool is not just a plugin in eclipse. It's a game changer for developers which eliminates the wait time and frustration in building and redeploying code. It reloads changes in java, spring annotations, xml, jsp, javascript and almost any types of files in fraction of time. It cuts off unnecessary distractions in development and makes developer more productive.

It consumes lot of space resulting in out of space exception some times. The first build process is little time taking and if the development involves switching between GIT branches from time to time then the developer needs to make sure the configurations are intact.

time saved

Easy to use, saves a lot of time and nerves for developers which at the end means a lot of money saved

Price can always be a bit lower, not easy to handle who is allowed / disallowed to use license within the company