Having finally got Hibernate Tools working with a project I’m working on, I was pretty excited - the HQL console and auto-complete features are going to save us tons of time, specifically, time spent re-deploying the web application as we debug JPQL queries. Time spent redeploying an application is wasted time and can sometimes eat up 30 minutes to an hour per day, depending on what you are doing, so any time saved there is really helpful.

Today, I came across something to cut down redeployments even further - JavaRebel. JavaRebel lets you reload Java classes, making it so you don’t have to redeploy your app whenever you change a class. I was able to get it working in an Eclipse/WTP setup today - the big thing you have to do is disable class reloading on the WTP module. Overall, pretty easy to setup - it only took me a few minutes.

The one downside - it costs $99. The price may be small for a lot of teams though - it pays for itself after it saves a developer hour or so. Definitely worth checking out.