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Devoxx is an annual European Java conference with a total of 3200 attendees from 35 countries and again has been completely sold out. This is also the last conference this year that ZeroTurnaround will be present at.

It has been a very busy year for us, visiting Jax.de, JavaONE, Great Indian Developer Summit, TSS Europe, Oracle World, JavaZone, JAOO, QCon SF and finally we are at the last event of 2008.

Our booth will be open in the exhibition area from December the 9th till December the 11th. If you want to see a demo of JavaRebel, sneak a peek at what is coming up next or just say hello be sure to drop by.

Jevgeni Kabanov, JavaRebel Lead, will present a talk Zero Turnaround in Java Development on 11th of December at 17:50-18:50 in room 7. This is a great opportunity to learn about different options for speeding up Java development.

See you at Devoxx.

Christmas sale for ZeroTurnaround products has started and will last till 4th of January 2009. Everything is 40% off. This means personal/commercial perpetual/yearly licenses and for both JavaRebel and JSP Weaver. See the exact prices from the buy page.

This is a great opportunity to equip your team with the latest in Java technology and start saving time and money today.

There has been a lot of discussion regarding the use of JavaRebel with Eclipse Web Tools Project (WTP). JavaRebel does work with WTP but the configuration is not that straightforward. In this article we’ll try to give step by step instructions on how to make WTP and JavaRebel get along.

The article is divided into two parts. If you have JavaRebel installed under WTP you can skip to the configuration section. If you are an old time WTP user just enable autopublishing and disable auto reloading for modules.

JavaRebel Installation under WTP

Lets get started by downloading the JavaRebel zip archive from the download page. Unzip the archive somewhere on your harddisk. Copy the javarebel.jar from the uncompressed folder to a location that you can use later on. We’ll assume on Windows that this is c:\javarebel.jar and on Linux /home/john/javarebel.jar.

We’ll configure the startup of the container next. I will be using Tomcat v6.0 version. Open up the “Run Configurations” dialog from the Eclipse menu Run » Run Configurations. You should see the following dialog.

Next open the (x)= Arguments tab in the dialog and edit the VM arguments text area as seen on the next screenshot. Add the following option to the end of the area.

Windows
-noverify -javaagent:c:\javarebel.jar

Linux
-noverify -javaagent:/home/john/javarebel.jar

Now apply the settings and run the configuration. You should see the following message in the console output.

You have installed JavaRebel under WTP now. Next you need to configure some WTP options so that WTP auto publish would not interfere with JavaRebel class reloading.

Automatic publishing should be enabled in the server configuration. Double click on your server name and a configuration page opens. Under the Publish section you should have the Automatically publish when resources change option selected. I’ve outlined the automatic publishing settings in the following screenshot.

All your modules should have Auto Reload disabled. You can achieve this by opening the Modules tab of the server configuration and editing each module to disable auto reloading.

This is it. Once you have these configurations in place and you have restarted the container you are ready to use JavaRebel with WTP.

Make changes to your Java source files and they will be reloaded by JavaRebel. Make changes to your static content under you WebContent and they will be copied by WTP to your deployment folder.

If you have any questions or problems about setting up WTP and JavaRebel leave a comment or send an email to support [at] zeroturnaround.com.

Eclipse 3.4 and WTP 3.0 were used to test the functionality. The article is inspired by Utilisation de JavaRebel avec Eclipse.

JavaRebel offers permanent (licensing policy changed on 9th of March) annual licenses to all JavaBlackBelt‘s brown belts. This is a personal 1 seat commercial license that you can use to speed up your Java development. If you don’t have a brown belt yet, start taking the exams. This is the fifth and currently strongest belt offered so it won’t come easily.

To apply for a free license just send a link to your brown belt profile from the email used at JavaBlackBelt to support[at]zeroturnaround dot com. We’ll get back to you with your license.

JavaBlackBelt is a community for Java & open source skills assessment. It is dedicated to technical quizzes about Java related technologies. Read the full announcement from their news archive.

This is a small bug-fix release of JSP Weaver. All the issues that have been reported have been fixed and some performance optimizations from the development snapshots have also been included. See the changelog for more information:

• New error screen with source display
• Updated Commons EL to ZeroTurnaround patched version
• General performance improvements
• Fixed issue with boolean tag attributes
• Fixed issue with c:foreach tag
• Fixed issue with containers using servlet output stream in included pages
• Fixed issue with scriptlets ordering in JSP XML format
• Fixed issue with imports and declared methods in statically included pages
• Fixed issue with resource paths not ending with slash

Head off to the download section to get the latest version.

Commons-EL is a widely used JSP 2.0 Expression Language Interpreter from Apache. It lets you easily access and manipulate application data in JSP files without requiring the use of scriptlets. Of course commons-el has caching mechanism in place so that newly added/changed fields are not visible in the EL until application redeploy. We have released a small patch and a custom build of the commons-el that lets you access the newly added/changed fields without the limitations. Hopefully this patch will be accepted to the unplanned commons-el 1.1 version.

This is a small bugfix release addressing the problems with Tomcat 6. Correct interpretation of the JSP Taglibrary descriptor, fixed JSP 2.0 SimpleTag handling and an upgraded XML parser. The new version is available from the download section.

JSPWeaver interprets the JSP markup on-the-fly instead of producing and compiling Java code. This reduces JSP reload times in development from tens of seconds to milliseconds.

The final release incorporates performance and stability improvements. JSPWeaver now supports the full JSP standard including common syntax, XML syntax and Java scriplets and is completely container-agnostic.

Installing JSPWeaver is as easy as dropping a JAR into WEB-INF/lib and registering the servlet in web.xml. Download it from ZeroTurnaround and give it a try.

Disclaimer: JSPWeaver is commercial software with a free trial for 21 days and developer seat cost at 49$.

Update: the Eclipse support has made it to the final 1.0 release of JavaRebel and development snapshots are not needed to use JavaRebel for Eclipse plugin development.

JavaRebel’s latest development snapshot includes support for the Eclipse Platform. The speedup that we can see with JEE servers when using JavaRebel applies also to other containers. In this case it is Eclipse. Developers can launch their plugins and as they change the source code they can see the results without restarting the new Eclipse instance.

We’ve prepared a small screencast (~5 min) that shows JavaRebel in action speeding up Eclipse plugin development.

Configuring JavaRebel for Eclipse is as easy as adding VM arguments -noverify and -javaagent:path/to/javarebel.jar and launch as usual as a Eclipse Application Configuration.

Usually JSP is first translated to regular Java code and then compiled into a Java servlet. JSP Weaver eliminates the Java generation and compilation stage by interpreting the JSP files on-the-fly. This reduces the time taken to reload a JSP up to 50 times bringing it from seconds down to milliseconds.

We have launched the next milestone of the JSP interpreter JSP Weaver. This release brings you the long awaited JSP standard syntax support and includes several fixes. All the known limitations have been addressed we are getting ready to release the final version. Now JSP Weaver supports full JSP specification from 1.0 to 2.1. However we do not support Java 5 language changes like generics and enums in scriptlets at the moment.

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