Hot reload for Grails 4 & JDK 8

[erichelgeson]

Add back in the option for hot reloading from spring-loaded. Though spring-loaded is all but abandoned - it does work well for Java 8. For hot reloading on JDK 8/11+ JRebel works as well.

This is needed as large projects can not tolerate upgrades due to how long dev-tools restarts take (sometimes up to 3 minutes per change). With spring loaded & a native file watcher on osx/linux this is sub second. Users can choose which option - dev-tools is still the default.

To enable:

build.gradle

dependencies {
    // Remove dev-tools from classpath
    // developmentOnly("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-devtools") 
    agent "org.springframework:springloaded:1.2.8.RELEASE"
    // (Optional) Native OSX file watcher
    runtimeOnly "io.methvin:directory-watcher:0.9.6"
    //...
}

[jameskleeh]

Are you planning on a CLI change to go along with this?

[erichelgeson]

eg: create-app --features=springloaded - potentially - will be documented after merge as well.

[davydotcom]

+1 to this

[bobbywarner]

I tested this locally and it works great. Reloading of Grails controllers, Grails services as well as regular Groovy classes all worked successfully.

[demon101]

@erichelgeson with agent "org.springframework:springloaded:1.2.8.RELEASE" hot reload working well, but grails war fails with error

Could not find method agent() for arguments [org.springframework:springloaded:1.2.8.RELEASE] on object of type org.gradle.api.internal.artifacts.dsl.dependencies.DefaultDependencyHandler.

gradle asseble works without errors.

Should I create an issue or gradle asseble can be used instead of grails war?

[matthijsbierman]

@demon101 I think this can be fixed by adding the agent to configurations:

configurations {
    agent
    developmentOnly
    runtimeClasspath {
        extendsFrom developmentOnly
    }
}

[demon101]

@matth

I think this can be fixed by adding the agent to configurations:

works! Thx!