This question came to me when developing using Eclipse.
I use JBoss Application Server and use hot code replacement. But this option requires that the ‘build automatically’ option to be enabled. This makes Eclipse build the workspace automatically (periodically or when a file is saved?) and for a large code base this takes too much time and processing which makes the machine freeze for a while. Also sometimes an error message is shown saying that hot code replacement failed.
The question that I have is: is there a better way to see the result of a code change?
Currently I have the following two suggestions:
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Have unit tests – this will allow to run a single test and see the result of a code change. ( But for a JavaEE application that uses EJBs is it easy to setup unit tests?)
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Use OSGi – which allows to add jars to the running system without bringing down the JVM.
Any ideas on above suggestions or any other suggestion or a framework that allows to do this is welcome.
Did you take a look at http://zeroturnaround.com/jrebel/?