Preface

Software development takes time, and consists of many phases. Meanwhile, two phases (software compilation and deployment) are ignored because they take a lot of time. Recompiling a large application is usually too long, and some users prefer to use a continuous-integration server, such as Hudson or Jenkins. It is a good idea, but you still have to wait to test and validate your work. This problem exists for both desktop and web applications. Also, web applications have to be deployed and updated after each code change, which is time consuming.

Modern IDEs are able to improve the compilation and deployment steps. Actually, they already do a very good job, and you could think it is not possible to work even faster. This is the main objective of this book. JRebel does the same job as IDEs, but you will understand why it is a killer app. Compilation and deployment times are almost reduced to zero.