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JRebel

Score8 out of 10

10 Reviews and Ratings

What is JRebel?

JRebel is a build automation tool developed by Estonian company ZeroTurnaround, acquired by Rogue Wave Software in 2017, and then acquired (and now supported by) Perforce since that company's 2019 acquisition of Rogue Wave. The vendor says users of JRebel saves Java teams a month of coding time per year on average.

Categories & Use Cases

Be more productive, happier, save money. Be JRebel.

Pros

  • Removes the time needed for redeployments of the source code - improves productivity, time to market, and saves money.
  • Easy to install
  • License renewals - the sales department reaches out to you long before the licenses expire so you can have time to get your approvals.
  • Analytics and reporting - it will show you the time saved by JRebel and even the ROI, if you input the average hourly cost of a developer.

Cons

  • In multi-project environments, the dependencies are not always reloaded.
  • License management - we use a license server with a combination of dedicated licenses and floating. I had some struggle managing these due to the License Server User Interface not being very intuitive.

Return on Investment

  • In the first year JRebel saved us $28k by removing the wasted development time for a team of 7 developers with 4 re-deployments per hour.
  • JRebel paid for itself in less than a month in the first year.
  • In the second year JRebel saved us $20k by removing the wasted development time for a team of 5 developers with 4 re-deployments per hour.
  • JRebel paid for itself in less than a month in the second year.

More consistent short development cycles than Instant Run...a must when doing backend code

Pros

  • Deploys all layout changes consistently (when Instant Run was initially available, you couldn't tell if the change you made to a layout was actually being tested or not).
  • Doesn't require a full build as often as Instant Run when changing code.
  • Works with compile time annotation libraries like Realm, etc.

Cons

  • Launch times are where JRebel is slower than Instant Run.
  • Sometimes, it has incompatibilities with how you wrote something and causes compile failures, but Zero turnaround is quick to respond.

Return on Investment

  • It has sped up development time for users that used it

Alternatives Considered

Andriod Studio

Other Software Used

Bamboo, JIRA Software, Gradle

Fastest redeploy ever

Pros

  • Fast redeploy

Cons

  • It worked great, no big cons

Return on Investment

  • It sped up the developing time, and time is money for the company.

Other Software Used

Apache Tomcat, Eclipse Luna