JRebel & Alfresco

[arhan]

I was wandering if anyone has the experience developing application based on Alfresco with the aid of JRebel.

A while ago there was a post on this forum about using JRebel with Alfresco and it seemed to be not that smooth. However, JRebel has matured quite a lot since that time and I've seen some software shops using JRebel with Alfresco in their own manner.

I'm interested in getting the feedback from Alfresco users who tried JRebel ( try, if you didn't do that yet!  ) - maybe the integration could be improved to make Alfresco users happier?

[vbreivik]

Hi.

I did a quick test developing some java based webscripts 6 months ago using JRebel. I had no problems with JRebel, it hot redeployed all my changes. However 2 other people in my team were not so lucky, they had problems getting JRebel working. Since I had no problems, I'm just guessing it was user error on their part.

Are you an employee of Zero Turnaround? If so, since you have seen software shops using JRebel with Alfresco, have you compiled together a best practice or user guide? I guess if you guys posted that it could help. I just used it like described on your web page and it worked.

Regards.

[arhan]

Are you an employee of Zero Turnaround? If so, since you have seen software shops using JRebel with Alfresco, have you compiled together a best practice or user guide? I guess if you guys posted that it could help. I just used it like described on your web page and it worked.

Yes, I'm dealing with JRebel development at ZeroTurnaround. Indeed, a better tutorial would help a lot.
My question was rather if there are any Alfresco specific configurations whose changes would be nice to be handled by JRebel.

Thanks for the feedback!

[damonrand]

Hi Arhan,

Bit of a late reply, just came across your post. I've been using JRebel with Alfresco for a while. Unfortunately I didn't have much success getting hot redeploys of the Spring configuration which is a big part of Alfresco development. I had performance issues when instrumenting the whole of Alfresco so I limited the rebel packages. Also had some trouble with the Jasper plugin, needed to double disable it for some reason. This was the very limited config I got working in the end, it works nicely with for Alfresco java backed webscripts and has been really helpful.

-javaagent:/Applications/ZeroTurnaround/JRebel/jrebel.jar -Drebel.load_embedded_plugins=false -Drebel.jasper_plugin=false -Drebel.packages=com.mydomain

An article showing how to avoid restarts for non-Java parts of Alfresco module development would be useful, particularly log4j, module property files and module spring context files.
http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Developing_an_Alfresco_Module

Cheers,
Damon.

–
Damon Rand
Senior Alfresco Developer

Zaizi Limited
222 Westbourne Studios, 242 Acklam Road
London W10 5JJ
UK