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.
Blog
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:
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!
We have an official announcement to make, the world-conquering ZeroTurnaround team has new investors. See our press release below and cheer with us! (virtual beer included)
—
July 25, 2011, Tartu, Estonia – Bain Capital Ventures and notable angel investors, including Salil Deshpande, have backed ZeroTurnaround, the company behind innovative productivity enhancing solutions for the Java community including JRebel and LiveRebel. JRebel is the only solution that enables developers to save 15-20% of their coding time by removing the build and redeploy process, so they can instantly see changes made to their code, in their development application. LiveRebel is the only solution that enables production Java EE environments to automatically and instantly deliver hot updates to live applications, eliminating downtime and lost sessions.
Bain Capital Ventures’ backing of ZeroTurnaround includes a buyout of Webmedia Group’s ownership in the company. “We are thankful to Webmedia Group and their management team for providing initial seed funding and support to help us launch ZeroTurnaround”, said Jevgeni Kabanov, creator of the company’s flagship product JRebel, founder and CTO of ZeroTurnaround, “Now we are ready to go forward to conquer new countries and create new products with our fantastic international team and partners.” Taavi Kotka, Estonian Business Line Manager explained: “It is an intoxicating and exciting feeling to witness the birth of a new invention and see its progress towards conquering the world. Big thanks to the ZeroTurnaround team whose success has kept us high for the past 4 years. At the same time, we do realize that ZT needs different partners to reach the next level.”
Bain became involved with ZeroTurnaround because of the high productivity improvements ZeroTurnaround delivers to their customers by addressing core problems in Java. “We are proud to partner with the entire ZeroTurnaround team to build a world-class infrastructure software company. The innovation at ZeroTurnaround helps the Java community deliver better code in less time and with less downtime. Additionally, ZeroTurnaround’s value and uniqueness was recently showcased as the ‘Most Innovative Java Technology 2011’ in the JAX Awards,“ said Ben Holzman, Partner at Bain Capital Ventures. “ZeroTurnaround’s fantastic technical team has built great software that improves productivity for customers around the world. We look forward to aiding the company’s expansion into North America.”
“With triple-digit growth every year since inception, and nearly 300% in 2010, we are excited to work with the team of Ben Nye and Ben Holzman from Bain Capital along with Salil Deshpande, the same team that backed and helped build dynaTrace Software, a recent success story in Java and .Net performance management,” said David Booth, CEO of ZeroTurnaround.
About ZeroTurnaround
Founded in 2007 in Estonia, ZeroTurnaround makes Java more productive for both development and production teams with award-winning Rebellion technology. JRebel and LiveRebel integrate directly into the JVMs, application servers and development tools of the world’s leading financial, web application and technology firms, including the Bank of America, American Airlines, Lufthansa, LinkedIn, HP, Siemens, Logica, Kayak, Oracle, IBM, and more. ZeroTurnaround is proud to support the Eclipse Foundation as a solutions member. See more and join the Rebellion.
___________
About Bain Capital Ventures
Bain Capital Ventures is the venture arm within Bain Capital, which has approximately $65 billion of assets under management worldwide. The firm’s history of investing in early stage companies dates back to 1984 with over 125 venture investments since inception. Bain Capital Ventures manages $1.5 Billion of assets, has over 70 active portfolio companies, and has offices in Boston, New York, and Palo Alto. The firm has a successful history of partnering to build great software companies, including: Solarwinds (NYSE:SWI), LinkedIn (NYSE:LNKD), dynaTrace Software (acquired by Compuware), Network Intelligence Corporation (acquired by EMC), Archer Technologies (acquired by EMC), AppAssure Software, Rapid7, SingleClick Systems, and VMTurbo. Bain Capital Ventures has helped steer many ideas to success by working in partnership with management teams, pairing talented and passionate entrepreneurs with industry experts, opening doors to customers, and collaborating on sound long-term strategies.
About Webmedia Group
Webmedia Group is headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia. The company is the largest software solutions provider for the Estonian market with growing international operations, employing about 600 specialists in total. Founded in 2000, the company offers software solutions to clients in the public as well as private sector. In 2008 and 2009, Webmedia Group was recognized among the 30 fastest growing technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe, and 500 fastest growing technology companies in the EMEA region.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been more than 3 years since the JRebel 1.0 release. It seems like it was only yesterday that we were putting together the first public beta, then opening the first champagne to celebrate when Nathan Hamblen bought the first license a week later. Thanks to him and all of you, our loyal users, today the JRebel team proudly presents the 4.0 release.
The major features are:
- Full support for reloading changes to EJBs 3.x. Includes adding new components and adding @EJB references on-the-fly, across Weblogic, WebSphere, JBoss and Glassfish.
- Support for anonymous class reloading. Previously, adding a new anonymous class would cause the other ones to be renamed (Class$3 -> Class$4) and JRebel would complain that a superclass has changed and fail to reload. Never again.
- Instrumentation/HotSwap integration. Although JRebel always used a -javaagent to bootstrap, it hasn’t actually used the Instrumentation API before. Now, on Java 5 or later, we make use of this functionality to minimize the runtime performance overhead and to further improve the debugging behaviour. This also lays ground for some future improvements.
- Full Seam 2.x support. Now you can add new components and wire them in on-the-fly. Enjoy!
- Better integration across the board. Hibernate Validator and Spring Security are the biggest names, but we have severely expanded our test suite with support for 35 frameworks, not counting the server, standard and miscellaneous integrations.
And of course a score of smaller features and fixes as usual that you can find in changelog.
Well, what are you waiting for? Grab it now!
Today we’ve released JRebel 4.0 RC1, which includes even more improvements to EJB support and a few fixes in Spring integration. Also an initial integration for Metro, JAX-WS reference implementation, is included. What are you waiting for? Download the new version now!
EJB integration now includes the support for Oracle WebLogic 10.3 and has been tested with several 10.3.x versions. You can now add new EJB component and inject it to other deployed EJB without having to redeploy the application. With the latest changes, adding new EJBs is supported on JBoss 4.2/5.1, Glassfish 3.0/3.1, WebSphere 7 and WebLogic 10.3 application servers.
Now, it is just a few strokes left to make JRebel 4.0 final and shiny!
