This post is both an advice and a short story in the life of a Fatwire consultant.
Some time ago I faced one of the most challenging tasks I can remember. It was not particularly hard from the technical side but it was very hard given the time constraint and the environment I had to work.
Basically I had to "fix" (let's say so) an URL Assembler to create some special behaviours for some specific assets. Normally I develop my URL assembler in the Jump Start so I can restart quickly and freely. In that special case, I had to work on a development server because the URL Assembler was actually dependent on the content.
The problem was the specific development server was hosted in a JBoss server in a pretty slow machine, and shared by two other developers that were working on it at the same time.
Restarting the development server was taking each time something close to 5 minutes, and everytime I restarted it, immediately I received phone calls, instant messaging or people coming to my desk very angry saying "have you restarted again"? The time constraint was also very tight, I had to complete that task in a couple of days... but it was very likely I had to restart a number of times because it was a trial and fail process. The situation was looking desperate and I was ready to admit failure and face the consequences, when someone suggested to use JRebel. the dynamic code reloader for Java.
While I was aware of the existence of that tool, I never considered it. I was expecting a complex installation procedure, a very slow server afterwards, a lot of incompatibilities. But I was desperate enough to give at least a try.
To my great surprise, installation was very easy (just copy a jar in a folder and copy and paste a configuration in the launcher script). And when the application server was restarted it was looking to work perfectly. So I did the last step: I ensured that the compiled binaries of the class went directly in the classes directory of the cs.war and I started to code.
Every time I was building the class (actually just saving a class in Eclipse since it recompiles automatically) it got reloaded, without affecting the rest. A miracle! I was able to complete the task on time, and without other peole yelling at me.
The bottom line is: when you have to code in Fatwire something that is a class... JRebel is very likely to be a great time saver (and a life saver as well, sometimes...).
