JavaRebel is one of those products you wonder how you lived without before you found it. We’ve been evaluating it on my current project. It enables you to make code changes and hot swap them into the running JVM on the fly, much more transparently than you’ve ever seen or experienced with any IDE and JVM combo in debug. It actually does some pretty clever stuff on the fly (more info on their site). The end result is you can delay having to restart your app server or redeploy your app, because any code changes you make are patched in to the running classes in the deployed app. Very clever.
Anyway, the company behind it are looking for a new product name, since they’ve been approached and asked to remove ‘Java’ from the name. Head over here to look at the current suggestions.