JRebel vs IntelliJ - hot swap

Question

I'm looking at getting JRebel licenses for my company.

However I just found out that IntelliJ already has a built in functionality to hot deploy classes.

At the moment we are using Netbeans and Eclispse and I'm wondering instead of buying JRebel licenses if we should just buy IntelliJ.

I tried a trial of IntelliJ (13.0.1) and the hot swap features seems to work fine (using JBoss AS 7.1.1). Only small details it seems that you have to manually compile the class that has been modified for IntelliJ to replace it on the server. JRebel does that automatically.

Now my question is for experienced user of IntelliJ and/or JRebel.

Is it really useful to have JRebel if I already have IntelliJ? Is JRebel better if I'm mostly interested in hot-replacing my classes?

All feedback/experience/advice welcomed.

Answer 1

For an environment like you described (mostly java EE 6 on JBoss 7 or later. Frameworks: JSF, Primefaces) the way to go is definitely JRebel.

Hotswap is capability of JVM, you can find comparison of this with JRebel on their website (http://zeroturnaround.com/software/jrebel/features/comparison-matrix/). So you can use this independently on your IDE.

The main advantage of JRebel is support for various frameworks and their lifecycles - e.g. when you change a bean class jrebel will reinitialize spring bean and all beans which depend on it - with hotswap you would need to redeploy because constructor/initialize method was already run.

I am a happy jrebel and intellij user (also used jrebel with netbeans successfully), no relationship with zero turnaround, angry at them for removing personal dev licenses.

Answer 2

IntelliJ does not have better hot swap than Netbeans or Eclipse, it is simply a matter of JVM. You can try DCEVM integration plugin, which have really good hot swap, in some cases even better than JRebel. But if you need support for frameworks like Spring, JRebel is the way to go. I recommend trying both before buying anything.