JRebel saves compile time. It "Instantly reload changes to Java classes" – that's the marketing talk anyway.

The theory is great. Anything has to be better than the randomness of Atlassian's FastDev or atlas-cli, right? If it's really worth the hype, I want to use it with the Atlassian SDK and speed up my development time. Here's a short tutorial for JIRA development. Scroll down to the video if you want a demo.

Getting up and running...

Here's my quick "how to" get up and running.
Get the jrebel.jar and save it somewhere - like /opt/jrebel/jrebel.jar

Add the jvmArgs in the plugin to point at said file (and turn off fast dev)…

<plugin>

     <groupId>com.atlassian.maven.plugins</groupId>

     <artifactId>maven-jira-plugin</artifactId>

     <version>${amps.version}</version>

     <extensions>true</extensions>

     <configuration>

          <productVersion>${jira.version}</productVersion>

          <productDataVersion>${jira.data.version}</productDataVersion>

          <enableFastdev>false</enableFastdev>

          <log4jProperties>src/main/extra/log4j.properties</log4jProperties>

          <jvmArgs>-javaagent:/opt/jrebel/jrebel.jar</jvmArgs>

     </configuration>

</plugin>

Add the jrebel-maven-plugin under build > plugins (see details of what does what here).

<plugin>

    <groupId>org.zeroturnaround</groupId>

    <artifactId>jrebel-maven-plugin</artifactId>

    <version>1.1.5</version>

    <configuration>

        <addResourcesDirToRebelXml>true</addResourcesDirToRebelXml>

        <alwaysGenerate>true</alwaysGenerate>

        <showGenerated>true</showGenerated>

    </configuration>

    <executions>

        <execution>

            <id>generate-rebel-xml</id>

            <phase>process-resources</phase>

            <goals>

                <goal>generate</goal>

            </goals>

        </execution>

    </executions>

</plugin>

Run atlas-run or atlas-debug on the command line, checking for any errors.

In Intelli-J, enable automatic compiling on code change by checking Make project build automatically:

Change something in your code & reload the page.

All is automatically updated. Immediately. No more waiting for code compile changes.

Check this quick video demo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG8ONumNsyA

The good news – it's pretty cool. The bad news – JRebel costs around $365 per seat per year. But think of all the time you save.