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Vaadin's Use of JRebel to Enhance Development Efficiency
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Middleware, SDKs & Libraries
- Functional Applications - Remote Monitoring & Control Systems
Applicable Industries
- Professional Service
- Software
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Remote Collaboration
- Remote Control
Services
- Software Design & Engineering Services
- System Integration
- Training
The Challenge
Vaadin Ltd faced significant productivity challenges due to the time-consuming process of redeploying applications during development. The development team, consisting of over 60 developers, was building various UI and system applications for customer projects. The redeploy time varied from 20 seconds to over a minute, depending on the environment, which significantly slowed down the development process. This delay not only affected the number of redeploys per hour but also impacted the overall efficiency and focus of the developers. The need for a solution that could reduce redeploy times and maintain the state across class reloads was critical to improving productivity and developer satisfaction.
About The Customer
Vaadin Ltd is the company behind the popular Vaadin Framework, an open-source software development tool for building high-quality web user interfaces for business software. Founded in 2000, the technology was initially developed to address programming challenges in a large-scale healthcare system. Java was chosen as the platform, and the project was open-sourced in 2002. Today, Vaadin is used daily by thousands of professional software developers in over 170 countries. The company is headquartered in Turku, Finland, with most of its 60+ developers working there. Vaadin also has offices in California and Frankfurt, providing services and consulting to a global clientele.
The Solution
To address the productivity challenges, Vaadin adopted JRebel, a tool that eliminates the need for constant redeploying during development. JRebel provides an instant feedback loop between developing and testing code, allowing developers to see changes immediately without waiting for redeploys. Petri Heinonen, a Vaadin Expert and program manager, has extensively used JRebel across various application servers, including Jetty, Tomcat, JBoss, GlassFish, and WebLogic. His development environment typically involves Eclipse or IntelliJ IDEA as the IDE, with Maven and Ant as the build tools. JRebel's support for these tools ensures seamless integration and automatic configuration during the build process. One of the key benefits of JRebel is its ability to maintain the state across class reloads, preserving the user's point in time during the reload. This feature significantly enhances productivity by allowing developers to test their code instantly and capture bugs early in the development cycle. Additionally, JRebel's ability to update CSS changes instantly before the introduction of the Sass compiler further streamlined the development process.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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