Australian company Atlassian offers Bamboo, a continuous integration server.
$1,200
JRebel
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
JRebel is a build automation tool developed by Estonian company ZeroTurnaround, acquired by Rogue Wave Software in 2017, and then acquired (and now supported by) Perforce since that company's 2019 acquisition of Rogue Wave. The vendor says users of JRebel saves Java teams a month of coding time per year on average.
Large companies will find it particularly useful, but smaller companies and independent developers will not be able to afford the cost, and will not see many advantages compared to using an open source solution. However, having some software to handle continuous integration build servers as well as deployments, and doing this consistently between products, is absolutely essential.
I recommend JRebel for Java developers, it will remove the time needed for redeployment, it will increase the focus on the task at hand (without being distracted by the redeployment) and will make them happier. I recommend JRebel for Java Development Managers, they should purchase this for their teams - it will increase productivity, decrease the product's time to market, and it will save money for the company. The ROI can be calculated upfront and presented to higher level management for approving this, if needed.
Continuous Deployment - you can use Bamboo to automatically build and deploy whenever there are changes in the source code.
Continuous Integration - by integrating the automated tests and the integration tests before deploying you make sure you know immediately if the latest code fits into the whole scheme of apps.
Integration with Jira and Bitbucket.
Flexibility with the program language used for builds: Maven, Ant, PowerShell, any command line tools.
Bamboo offers solid usability for teams looking for an integrated, scalable CI/CD solution, especially those using Atlassian tools. Its interface is intuitive for existing Atlassian users, and its focus on deployment automation makes it a strong option for continuous delivery. However, its complexity and cost may pose challenges for small teams or those new to CI/CD. Overall, Bamboo’s usability shines in environments where ease of integration and streamlined workflows are prioritized. Still, it may require more effort for teams unfamiliar with its setup or without dedicated resources.
The performance of JRebel is great. It is enabling the Java team to do hot re-deployments and it has to be transparent and fast for the user, otherwise the whole purpose of reducing wasted time with re-deployments doesn't make sense. Also the User Interface for License Server management and analytics loads fast and the navigation through pages is quick.
Support for Bamboo has started lack a little over the years. Atlassian has been moving more towards Bitbucket Pipelines and away from the on-premise install of Bamboo. While the tool is still great, it may take a little bit of time to get a question answered by official support.
We chose Bamboo over Jenkins for 2 reasons - one, for its tight integration amongst all the products in the tool suite. We find explicit value in the traceability from JIRA issues all the way down to the Bamboo build that was triggered by the check in of those issues. The second reason was for support - we didn't want the burden of figuring out how to support Jenkins in our production environment, as can be the case with so many open source products.
Hot code swapping doesn't have many players...it's mainly JRebel. We use JRebel a lot in our backend code development where it minimizes our development cycle (20min down to 30sec). For Android, the competitor is Android Studio's Instant Run which works fairly well now. For smaller apps, Instant Run is faster deploying but needs more full builds. With JRebel, you hardly ever need to do a full build.
