Can JRebel individually redploy a jar for maven dependency update instead of whole ear

Question

We have an ear that is deployed to Weblogic and we are using JRebel for hot deploy using its eclipse plugin. Everything works fine and whenever files are modified they get updated correctly to server.

However sometimes a jar file that is created by another team and used in our ear is re-published to our internal maven repo. To pickup the latest jar we rebuild our ear. Even though only one jar got reloaded JRebel updates every single class that's loaded in weblogic and this takes a lot of time. Is there a way to prevent full reload of classes because the ear got re-built? Also not all classes in the jar would have updated, does JRebel have ability to only update the modified file within the jar.

The second team does not use JRebel while development.

Answer 1

JRebel works only with the individual class files, and not with JARs. If you change dependency you will have to redeploy the application, unfortunately. However, there's ways to workaround.

If you can use the dependency as a source, you can then generate the dedicated rebel.xml for that module and work with it as a part of your project.

If you can't use the dependency as a source, there's one more workaround: package rebel.xml into that JAR and map it to some arbitrary location. Then extract the classes of the new version of the JAR into that location.