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JRebel (formerly Javarebel) uses reflection, byte code modification and other clever approaches to remove turnaround time from a developers’ daily life.  When combined with an IDE, these approaches need a little tweaking, so — The JRebel Plugin for IntelliJ IDEA focuses on improving JRebel in IntelliJ IDEA, handling debugging issues, and making it easy for you to configure JRebel, directly from the IDE interface.

Debuggers are quite happy when code does not change during your debug sessions (with the exception of hotswap) and they are a great aid for solving difficult bugs. Once JavaRebel enters the scene they can get cranky about app state, and say things like,

“What? You renamed a method? Come on, you can’t do that!”

This plugin solves debugging issues with IntelliJ.  It also improves JRebel usability significantly — Although JRebel is easy to configure, it would sure be nice to configure it from a checkbox instead of adding JVM arguments somewhere.  Now you’ll never say,

“Why do I have to write XML when I’ve actually configured my project inside the IDE already?”

This plugin allows you to skip writing the XML yourself, and generate a rebel.xml based on your IDE project configuration.

Oh – and one more thing…  Instead of tweaking JVM arguments with the javaagent or noverify flags, you can now press the JRebel launch button. It will use your regular container startup but will add the parameters itself, based on the javarebel.jar, which is specified in your settings. For a complete list of features check out the new JRebel IntelliJ tutorial.

This plugin is compatible with IntelliJ 8.x releases. To support debugging with older IDEA versions we’re still maintaining the old plugin.

More info:

• Plugin homepage at IntelliJ plugin repository (download here)
• Installation Guide
• Issues? Problems? Raving Compliments?
• Old plugin homepage at IntelliJ plugin repository
• SVN repository
• SVN repository for the old plugin

Toomas Römer

Toomas Römer is the co-founder and product lead of ZeroTurnaround. Once a Linux junkie, he was fooled by Apple into proprietary OS and devices. He is a big fan of JUGs, OSS communities and beer. He blogs at dow.ngra.de, tweets from @toomasr and also runs the non-profit chesspastebin.com website. In his spare time he crashes Lexuses while test driving them, plays chess, Go and Starcraft. Looks can fool you; he will probably beat you in Squash. You can connect with Toomas on LinkedIn.

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