Wednesday 12 September 2012

WAS Liberty Profile has joined the Rebellion

As announced by Zero Turnaround, the JRebel 5.0.1 release now supports the WebSphere Application Server 8.5 Liberty Profile - Awesome!  But what does this mean to the typical developer?

Well, you'll now be able to perform more complex operations that can effectively be hotswapped into the Liberty Profile runtime and see your changes take effect at runtime without restart of the application server or application. The more complex operations include such things as adding and removing methods and fields as well as a long list of others.

So what does this really mean to Liberty Profile devs? Well, for the most part, you don't need to worry about redeploying anymore! This is great news if you have large applications that take time to build, export and deploy, as now you can just hit 'Ctrl+S' and your updates will be used by the Liberty Profile environment (via some JRebel agent magic).

Here's the setup on my mac:

Eclipse IDE (Indigo)
WebSphere Application Server developer tools (WDT)
JRebel plugin (Just using a trial licence for now)
WebSphere Liberty Profile 8.5
JRebel agent jar

Here's it working:


How cool was that!  Imagine all those little changes you could now make and test in an instant, that you'd previously bundle up as one big update and spot a glaringly obvious mistake as soon as you deploy! Oh... is that just me? :o)

Time to get cooler... (cranks the dial to 11) lets use remoting, a service which allows you to perform the same as above with a manual sync step but to a remote machine.  Let's say oooooh a Raspberry Pi!  I chose a Raspberry Pi because i) it's a machine which wouldn't be able to (sensibly) run a big IDE like eclipse, ii) to keep up my reputation - Simon the Pi man! iii) Raspberry Pi's are cool!

Here's it working: