I’ve been using JRebel for little more then a month now on the yellow pages project. It think it’s safe to say it saves me about a day of waiting for deployments in a 30 day time frame.
UPDATE: I forgot to mention, on those 30 days I worked only 12 days. I think JRebel stats don’t take that into account so it’s more like 2 days in 30.
In the previous post I wrote that the actual time savings is probably a bit less because you can do other stuff. But during Devoxx Joachim claimed ‘you safe more then JRebel shows you’. And you know what, he’s right.
What happens without JRebel?
You deploy, restart server. During waiting time you check email or twitter or stare outside thinking … (fill in what you do). This means you get distracted from your ‘coding flow’. You get distracted more often then every 25 minutes.
What happens when JRebel is active?
You don’t deploy, JRebel does that for you when hitting a page that has changed Java code behind it. This means you don’t start reading email or twitter or … Hence you don’t get distracted and can stay in your ‘coding flow’. You don’t have to refresh your memory every time you turn back towards your IDE to pick up where you left before deploying and reading email or …. Consequence: you can keep writing code and don’t get distracted, most likely resulting in better code.
The previous JRebel post.