Last week I posted a story about Estonian start-up Programeter, that develops a programmer performance measuring software. But there’s another great tool, made in Estonia, that could give a fair boost of productivity for software developers. I am talking about ZeroTurnaround – a trademark of Webmedia Ltd.

ZeroTurnaround focuses on improving developer productivity. Its flagship product JavaRebel is a JVM plug-in that monitors Java classes and reloads changes without restarting your application or losing any state. It makes Java programming on-the-fly.

„Turnaround,“ as the Head of R&D of Webmedia, Jevgeni Kabanov explains, „is the time it takes for the changes in code to  propagate to the running application. It includes build time, deploy  time and initialization time. As the name suggests we provide developer tools that decrease that turnaround time to zero.“

In other words, for those who are not so familiar with Java programming routine: imagine that you are drawing something on a paper with your eyes shut. Then you will open your eyes to see what you have drawn. Shut them again and modify what you have drawn. Then open your eyes again to see how it looks like now. And so on. That’s similar to what Java programming routine is like.

The only difference being that it sometimes takes up to 10 minutes for the programmer to see the result of his “drawing”. Depending on the technologies that are used and work that’s done. That waiting is called deploying (or redeploying) and it is, in essence, a waste of time for the developers.  

When you are working as a programmer in a big software development company, where people deploy many times during an hour, your company is wasting a lot of time. And money. Deploy-time often means surfing the web, talking with friends or colleagues, having a cigarette or a cup of coffee. People have hard time concentrating and productivity of the company is low. 

With JavaRebel the deploy takes maximum 1-2 seconds. And you will have a cigarette after your work is done! Imagine how much money can companies like IBM or Oracle save, having thousands of developers. 

Ivo Mägi, Chief Development Officer of Webmedia says that JavaRebel has currently more than 10 000 users worldwide, which is the first step while conquering the market of enterprise Java development. The tool has been downloaded in many countries, including US, China and Germany.

For example LinkedIn Corp has purchased JavaRebel licenses for all its Java engineers to use in the well-known social networking website development.

However, size of the market for JavaRebel is considered by different researches to be over 5 000 000 Java developers, who all could benefit from this product. „Feedback from the developers has been really positive, by going into the extremes as this cannot be true, right?“ Mägi claims.

The only problem with JavaRebel seems to be that not all programmers are flattered by it. Some lazy ones say it’s inhumane, because they have to work more.

Besides supporting the current product the Webmedia development team is working on the new possibilities – upgrading production environments without service outage. Current estimations show that the first sites using JavaRebel in production will be launched at the end of 2008.

You can download JavaRebel from the ZeroTurnaround site. The price of unlimited and perpetual license starts from 99 USD per programmer.

And by the way, there’s one other tool ZeroTurnaround is offering. It is the JSP Weaver, that is marketed with the following message:  “Usually JSP is first translated to regular Java code and then compiled into a Java servlet. JSP Weaver eliminates the Java generation and compilation stage by interpreting the JSP files on-the-fly. This reduces the time taken to reload a JSP up to 50 times bringing it from seconds down to milliseconds.”

Webmedia is the biggest and fastest growing software developer in The Baltics, with operations in nine countries.

Pictured: Toomas Römer (on left) and Jevgeni Kabanov – two of three “geniuses” behind JavaRebel.