Java tools company ZeroTurnaround is making a bid for the Java EE space with its new LiveRebel 1.0 tool, which is newly released this week. The product is positioned as a means of instantly updating live production apps across a complete cluster with no downtime and with no OutOfMemoryErrors.
The new offering is built on the same technology as JRebel, ZeroTurnaround's small JVM-plugin for Java developers, which again is designed to allow programmers to instantly see any code change made to an app without redeploying.
According to the company's website, "JRebel lets you see code changes instantly, versioning classes and resources individually and updating one at a time instead of as a lump application redeploy."
With the arrival of LiveRebel 1.0, this Estonian company is attempting to re-invent live update work scenarios across what it describes as a "multitude of production environments" if required.
According to ZeroTurnaround's official blog, LiveRebel 1.0 provides a fully scriptable server and web console that can manage single-node, clustered, or cloud Java EE applications of any size on any container. The tool works by controlling the versioning of each class and resource individually instead of reloading the whole application. ZeroTurnaround says that this avoids the problems associated with container redeployment and rolling upgrades.
Updates are then rolled out instantly and "opaquely" to the developer user in question — the tool uses an all-Java JVM plugin (-javaagent) on the nodes causing a 3-5% performance overhead.
"In a recent survey we did, we saw that only 27.4% of over 600 respondents were satisfied with the update process of Java EE applications. The rest cited multiple issues with container redeployment, lack of tooling and automation, as well as lack of industry-standard processes. With the release of LiveRebel 1.0 we can finally offer a solution to this industry-wide problem," said the company.
