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During the season of holidays, even the code-geeks lift their heads from the computer and ask themselves: what is it that I am doing and why am I doing it? At ZeroTurnaround, the answers came quickly when we had a all-hands-aboard team meeting in Estonia last week.

The answers were quick to come (hey, we need to get back to our code, not fool around and do nothing!), such as that ZeroTurnaround has a product that actually gives value and is needed by our customers (have you heard of JRebel?), that our team consists of intelligent people who take responsibility for their work, and on top of that we can still have tequila shots at work parties. There was something else that still is ringing in my head like a Christmas Carol, which is what Oleg from the LiveRebel team said: “When I look at Lauri’s or Rein’s written code, I think to myself that it’s a work of art!” All in all: We make art with passion in our office.

We hope that our passion for making Java fast and fun helps you write gorgeous code, and inspires you to turn your work into an piece of art. Have a wonderful holidays and a great New Year!

President Toomas Hendrik Ilves of Estonia is a tall, impeccably dressed man with a bow tie whose 45-minute visit to our bigger and brighter offices might at first seem intimidating to a group of geeks. Luckily, President Ilves has a bit of inner geek of his own–the visit marked an occasion to celebrate ZeroTurnaround’s contributions and impact on Estonian economy and awareness and reach of Estonian IT in the world. ZeroTurnaround’s innovations are making waves in the global IT world by winning three awards in a single year (the JAX Innovation Award, Duke’s Choice Award and the Estonian Innovator of the Year Award), and growing the team size by 250% in 2011 alone.

So what did we talk about?

Well, President Ilves is not a JRebel user, so we described our first product line with gusto and snacks, then described LiveRebel and how we see the future of continuous deployment (and continuous delivery). More related to his interests, co-founders Jevgeni Kabanov and Toomas Römer discussed ZeroTurnaround’s global markets, spreading the good word and raising awareness about the Estonian IT sector and e-Estonia, our drive to hire the best developers in the Estonian market, and the company’s ambitious plans for 2012 and beyond.

Thank you, Mr. President, and hope to see you soon for a sauna visit! ;-)

Morning coffee between the man who created JRebel, Jevgeni Kabanov and The President of The Republic of Estonia, Mr Toomas Hendrik Ilves

From Tartu to the World: Mr President's visit was a huge honor to ZeroTurnaround's team and their efforts

How can we together bring Estonian innovative IT products and services into focus?

Pictures by Rein Raudjärv

This week, JRebel 4.5.1 was released! Although it was a minor release, you can still spot quite a lot of interesting improvements. The new features are in beta stage and would love to get the feedback from users to polish the even more. This time we have payed attention to JAX-RS – the new plugins for Jersey and Apache CXF were added to the distribution and tested on an enormous number of containers, including JBoss, WebLogic, Tomcat, Resin and many others. We have tested and improved our integration for EJB 3.1 Lite on Glassfish 3. JRebel integrations were updated to support the recent versions of containers, e.g. Virgo 3 and Resin 4.0.23. And there’s also a number of fixes included – check out the changelog!

Now JRebel team is working on more awesome stuff to come with the next updates, stay tuned!

We just opened a Boston office for sales, we are looking for a CFO and engineers in Estonia, marketing is expanding in Prague and we’ll find a place for you in our hearts and minds if you’re are awesome enough :) Check out the Jobs 2.0 page for more.

Live from the JavaOne 2011 conference we are happy to announce the first major update to our production update management tool, LiveRebel.

With this release we make another step to a go-to management tool for all you Java application update needs. For starters, LiveRebel now supports initial deploying applications through the LiveRebel Command Center. To make your life simpler, we no longer require you to add a liverebel.xml file to the archive, if it’s deployed through us.

To allow greater flexibility we have reworked the command line interface to the Command Center, e.g. allowing to pause the application to wait for database updates that can now be scripted with no manual intervention as a part of the update. We also allow more flexible workflows, so that the developer can review and prepare an update and ship only one application archive to the operations team in charge of the production environment.

We are also happy to report that the first production deployments and customer case studies are going very well and we will soon start posting the accounts on our blog. LiveRebel can truly quickly and painlessly enable the fully automated one-button delivery of changes to the production, that is coveted by the proponents of continuous delivery and similar practices.

Get the updated release to make use of these features, as well as numerous bug fixes and minor improvements as fully described in the changelog.

Before we’re off to JavaOne, EclipseCon Europe, Devoxx and a few other conferences, I wanted to give a decent review of JavaZone, an well-known conference for Java developers organized by javaBin in Oslo, Norway. This year I was given an opportunity to speak there, and I will say right away that this was an AWESOME event and in this post I’d like to share my impressions.

The very first session I attended was the Information Alchemy talk by Neal Ford which was basically a book promo. Neal talked about the art of delivering technical presentations, which was very inspiring. A lot of practical tips has been provided and after the talk I was even eager to fix my presentation slides. Nathaniel Schutta and Mathew McCullough, the co-authors of the new book, kindly agreed to review my slides and I think that caused a great improvement in my talk.

I attended both the talks by Daniel Spiewak’s, where the geekiness level of both the talks was far over the average mind. I have a feeling that I’m much smarter now than I was before coming to Oslo, thanks to Daniel :) I strongly encourage everyone to see the talks:

• Extreme Cleverness: Functional Data Structures in Scala
• High Wizardy in the Land of Scala

At the end of the 1st conference day Dick Wall and Carl Quinn hosted the JavaPosse session #363. The other members of the team joined over Google+ hangout session – that was the first time I’ve seen it in action actually.

I’ve delivered my own talk about Java bytecode on the 2nd day of the conference. This time I’ve included a small demo on using the ASM library for transforming a given class to record all the values for a single local variable in an arbitrary method of the class.

Bytecode for discriminating developers from JavaZone on Vimeo.

Play! 2.0 was announced at the conference and I attended the session about Play!, delivered by Nicolas Leroux and Peter Hilton. Play! makes use of Scala templates now and the guys actually mentioned that they plan to abandon Groovy templates, which this humble coder doesn’t like too much as a plan – Groovy templates are cool! :)

While there were quite a lot of interesting sessions on schedule and sometimes I couldn’t make up my mind where to go, the expo area was a little boring to me which is not usually the case at the other conferences. The reason is that the expo area is full of consultancies who are hiring and not that much interesting to see there. However, the great aspect of the expo area was the food – it was accessible anytime, anywhere!

Overall – great conference, great talks, top class organization, marvellous food, -1 for the expo.

That’s pretty big news.  JRebel for free?

Now, you may be thinking,

“But how can a company that survives off of their JRebel revenue (and employs >25 people) release a free version of the productivity tool? It even won a bunch of awards (JOLT Productivity Award, JAX 2011 Most Innovative Java Technology, Estonian Innovation 2011, and one more we can’t talk about yet)! Is their management team totally crazy?”

Here’s some background:

• We want to make a major impact on the Java Industry.
• We’ve collected data that says ~17.5% of every coding hour is spent building and redeploying.
• JRebel eliminates the need to build and redeploy.
• It’s been reported that there are about ~9 million java developers globally.

Imagine if those 9 million developers code on projects for 5 hours per day, over a 20 day period. That’s 900 million work hours, in what vaguely represents a month of work. JRebel could save 153 million hours of wasted time, per month, if every java developer in the world was using it. That’s more than 17,000 years of development time saved, every month. But JRebel costs about $1 per developer, per day – so some people can’t afford it. We want to change that. For about a year now, we’ve been thinking about different ways that we could give away JRebel for free – with one caveat – we can’t cannibalize our revenue and bankrupt the company — after all, we’ve got customers to think about, support cases to handle, and lots of new features to add – if we can’t do that stuff, then we’d be letting a lot of people down, and no one wants that. So our thoughts were… do we release a free version of JRebel…

• …with a limited feature set? If so, how do we separate the features?
• …for a limited amount of time?  We already offer a free 30-day evaluation…
• …and ask for donations?
• …that is free for a certain audience?  If so, what audience?  Hmmm… maybe we’re on to something here….

Introducing JRebel Social

JRebel Social is free to use for non-commercial development, and the only thing you need to do to use it, is let your network know it exists, once per month. Simply login and register using your Twitter or Facebook account and then pickup your online or offline license keys. As icing on the cake, you can see how much time you’ve saved by eradicating redeploys (and builds) from your Java development process, on your personal dashboard. You need to Download JRebel 4.5 to connect to Social. Try it out, and let others know what you think: https://social.jrebel.com I’m personally curious to see what will come of the thousands of hours that JRebel Social will save for the Java industry this year.. feel free to let me know what you’ll do with the extra time!

Click me for details on the 4.5 release.

David

Oh PS — we’re hiring! Engineers & Developers in Estonia, Marketing in Prague, and a Sales Team in Boston. Feel free to email us at jobs@zeroturnaround.com or Join The Rebellion

Wow – we won again!!

ZeroTurnaround received the honor of being recognized as the Estonian Innovator of the Year award for 2011. It is heart-warming to be recognized in the country the product is developed.

Each year, Enterprise Estonia, the Estonian Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the Estonian Employers’ Confederation give out awards for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. IT is definitely an important industry sector in Estonia, and also very competitive areas in today’s market. We are happy to have competed so well among other innovative Estonian firms, and thrilled to have received the award.

Our thanks goes to the jury for the prize and our best regards to the other nominees! Congratulations to Martin Koppel, on the left of Jevgeni in the photo, and Fortumo for winning the main prize, Entrepreneurship Award 2011!

It’s been quite a year – just a few months again, we received a JAX Innovation Award for JRebel, which was named “Most Innovative Java Technology” or 2011. In 2009, we got a Jolt Productivity Award. What could possibly be coming next?

Innovation is in our blood ;)!

Here you can see the clips of other nominees and the award ceremony (In Estonian).

We are very passionate about our work and our trade. So as the 0x100th day was nearing, we decided to celebrate it with a special challenge to all you developers out there! (and especially Java developers). And if you can solve then you would automatically pass through the first round of interviews at ZeroTurnaround :)

For bonus points write in the comments how long it took you and what tools did you use.

Have fun!

Some of our users pointed out that they missed the news about the minor releases. And indeed, we have realesed 3 minor versions during last two months. Now I’ll try to fill the void with the information, what has been added and improved in the new JRebel versions. The changelog is available for all the releases, however it makes sense to describe some of the points in more detail.

Debugger

First of all, the most important update is related to debugger integration. While in the major 4.0 release we introduced HotSwap integration, we discovered a few bugs right after. The problem was that the debugger couldn’t hit the breakpoint after a class has been reloaded, both in Eclipse and IntelliJIDEA. The issue required a fix in JRebel itself and also the IDE plugins had to be aligned in order to confirm to the new behavior.

The following screencast demonstrates the debugger behavior while JRebel is enabled in IntelliJIDEA.

Note that the debugger setup is now changed – previously Reload classes after compilation option had to be set to either Never or Ask. If asked, the user had to select not to hotswap the classes in the running application. But now the option should be either set to Always or, if asked, the user can choose to hotswap the changes via the debugger, even if a structural change, such as adding a field or changing a method signature, was introduced. See the related documentation for plugin configuration.

Fixes and new OSS framework integrations

A number of fixes were introduced in the plugins for the OSS frameworks. Spring, Struts, Hibernate – those are very popular frameworks and as the users report the issues the integrations become more and more polished.

Also, we’ve added some new integrations, including support for Apache Wink, Spring-WS and JAXB. The new plugins are disabled by default but you can easily switch on the required plugin using a corresponding VM option (e.g. -Drebel.springws_plugin=true).

Integration with brand new application servers

As some of our users would like to use the brand new versions of the application servers, even if these aren’t finalized yet, we actually do our best to introduce the support for the containers as early as possible. On the change log you can notice that we’ve added the initial integration with Geronimo 3 (still a milestone release) and JBossAS 7 application servers.

Java 7

The so long awaited Java 7 release is almost here and we’re sure it will get wide adoption right from the beginning. So JRebel has the initial support for Java 7 also. Don’t expect it to be super-stable yet, but we’re close to make it rock-solid soon!

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