Impala is a modular, dynamic productivity framework. The principal aim of Impala is to help developers extract every ounce of productivity out of the Spring development environment, while remaining true to the original Spring premise of simplicity and testability. The result is a much more productive Spring application development than you might think possible.
Here's how Impala lets you be more productive when working with Spring.
1. Virtually instantaneous build/deploy/test cycles
For typical Java applications, redeploying a change requires redeploying the whole application. Not with Impala. Only the affected parts of the application need to be deployed. This leads to virtually instantaneous build/deploy/test cycles, as the granularity of redeployment is typically very small relative to that of the application as a whole. You don't need to sit around for ages waiting for your whole application to load.
2. Automatic modification detection and redeploymentWhen you make a change to an Impala web application running in Eclipse, Impala can automatically pick up which parts of the application have changed, and redeploy those parts of your application without any user intervention. This removes the need for a manual step to perform this task. Impala gives you control over what resources are monitored for changes, how frequently resources are checked for modification, etc.
3. No explicit build step requiredWhen writing typical Java web applications using Eclipse, in many projects there is an extra build step required to package your applications in order to deploy them. Not with Impala. Eclipse automatically compiles your classes for you incrementally in the background. The project structure conventions for Impala mean that this sufficient, and that no extra build steps are required during development.
Of course, you can do a regular WAR build when required for packaging for a production environment.
4. You can write your integration tests interactivelyWriting Spring integration tests can be slow, particularly for monolithic single module applications. Impala allows you to write integration tests interactively. You can write and run integration tests using an interactive console within Eclipse. If making changes to your application between test runs, you simply redeploy the changed modules. If you're simply changing your test, you don't need to do anything special as changes to your test class will automatically be picked up on the fly. All of this leads to a much more rapid build/deploy/test cycle when writing integration tests than would be possible otherwise.
5. Suites including integration tests run super-efficientlyWhen running a suite of integration tests, modules needed by successive tests are loaded incrementally and remain available for subsequent tests run as part of the same suite. There is no need for continually starting and stop Spring application contexts, which can really slow down the execution of integration tests.
All of this makes test suite execution really fast, making Impala very friendly to use in environments where developers are expected (as they should be) to run the full project test suite before each commit to the version control system.
6. Setup is very simpleFor a developer getting started on an existing project using Impala, it is really as simple as "check out and go" - simply check out the project files and starting writing and deploying the application within the IDE.
If you're starting a new project, this too is easy, as Impala provides a script which allows you to set up a simple, working application by executing a couple of commands.
7. Easy to use build and dependency management support if you need itImpala works with Maven, but if you're not a fan of Maven, Impala also features a reusable build system which saves you having to write create your own build from scratch. Impala also gives you a simple way to pull third party library jars and source from Maven repositories, even if you aren't using Maven as your build system.
