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.
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Travis CI
Score 7.3 out of 10
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Travis CI is an open source continuous integration platform, that enables users to run and test simultaneously on different environments, and automatically catch code failures and bugs.
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.
TravisCI is suited for workflows involving typical software development but unfortunately I think the software needs more improvement to be up to date with current development systems and TravisCI hasn't been improving much in that space in terms of integrations.
It's simple and easy to get started (it can detect the language being used based on build configuration files like a Maven pom.xml).
It's free (as in beer) for open source projects.
It has a responsive staff (you can file issues on GitHub to ask for new languages or packages to be supported, and the turnaround time isn't too bad for the free offering).
The user interface is beautiful and easy-to-use, including features like live-tailing in-progress builds.
It supports specifying private environment variables and encrypted credentials, so that you can safely automate deployments (for example, pushing built docker images to DockerHub).
Travis CI is a fairly mature platform now, and most, if not all of the common complaints have been improved. This includes documentation and logs with color support.
TravisCI hasn't had much changes made to its software and has thus fallen behind compared to many other CI/CD applications out there. I can only give it a 5 because it does what it is supposed to do but lacks product innovation.
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.
After the private equity firm had bought this company the innovation and support has really gone downhill a lot. I am not a fan that they have gutted the software trying to make money from it and put innovation and product development second.
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.
Jenkins is probably the leading choice for automation and has loads of features and a large community behind it, but it can be overkill for many projects. It also has more of a web 1.0 look and interface. CircleCI is another similar big competitor, but cannot compete with Travis CI's free account [in my opinion].
