Implementing Hot code swap for Dalvik

Question

My company does a lot of Android development and we're hampered by the long compile, dex, package, deploy cycles. Given the current state of the Dalvik VM and tools, is building something like JRebel for Android would be possible?

Answer 1

JRebel for Android is now in beta and you can now signup for an invite. Hopefully this will be what both of us want.

Answer 2

I've got the JRebel for Android beta access not long ago. And it's working already pretty fast: it tooks ~20sec to make-reload the project after changes. 20 sec is much faster than 2 min with Gradle.

It's still not live-coding for Android, but JRebel team works hard on optimizations. I bet that stable release of JRebel for Android will be close to live-coding.

Btw, there are alternatives for the JRebel for Android:

1. Layout Cast - pretty unstable at the moment, and requires Android 5+
2. Buck from Facebook. Haven't tried it by myself, but benchmarks say that it works faster than Gradle builds. Worth a try.