dcevm

Java web application development have been criticized a lot in the past as painful compared to building building php web application.  When developing an application in php, developers would refresh the browser to see changes they have made.

In java, the developer would have to  restart the server and then refresh the browser. This process limits developer productivity. JRebel was created to solve this problem and has done this very well. The only problem is that jrebel is not free.  

A free alternate to jrebel is  "Dynamic Code Evaluation Virtaul Machine"  or  "DCEVM" .  I wrote about DCEVM  a while back. This article would describe how I use it in my development environment. My environment consist of the following tools

One of the arguments dynamic language enthusiasts bring up as a negative attribute against the java ecosystem is that during development they do not have to stop and restart their servers when a code change is made.

While this statement isn't totally true, I do agree that it is a pain to always restart your application server just to see a simple change in any environment.

In the Java world, there are several cases when you really do not have to restart the application server to make a simple change.

Most notably would be making a change to a JSP page. JSPs are normally dynamically compiled.