Deployment for FastSwap

While the points in this article are a distillation of the release notes, something that release notes rarely cover well is the true value of some features. Supporting new APIs and protocols are mostly obvious if you are interested in using them, and you are interested in using them because you have read about them elsewhere. But the huge boon that FastSwap Deployment provides to a developers daily life is not adequately captured in:


"With FastSwap Deployment in WLS, Java classes are redefined in-place without reloading the ClassLoader, thereby having the decided advantage of fast turnaround times. This means that you do not have to wait for an application to redeploy and then navigate back to wherever you were in the Web page flow. Instead, you can make your changes, auto compile, and then see the effects immediately."


The above does not touch on the hundreds of work hours wasted every year on packaging and deploying code to see the change of a single update. It does not touch on the equal (or greater) amount of time spent by testers who find bugs, then document them, discuss them, assign them to developers who in turn must make minor changes because they did not test after every update because they did not want to waste the time doing so during development. All things being equal, the FastSwap Deployment feature is enough to tip the scales for me.


If you had any doubt about the popularity of Spring, the inclusion of an out-of-the-box management console in the most popular commercial EJB server should remove it. There is also full integration with Spring security.