title: Remote Java compiler
body: <p>I'm looking for a way to boost my team's productivity, and one way to do that would be to shorten the time it takes to compile &amp; unit test &amp; package &amp; deploy our Java EE application which is getting bigger and bigger.</p>
  
  <p>The trivial solution that I know of is to set up a powerful computer with N processors (N ~= num of developers) and a blazingly fast disk system and a lot of memory, and run everything on this computer and connect to it via X remotely. It would certainly be much faster than compiling on our laptops, but still cheaper and easier to maintain than to buy each developer his/her own supercomputer.</p>
  
  <p>Is there another way to solve this problem? For example, could we run our IDEs locally and then tell it to remote compile java source? Can Netbeans / Eclipse / IntelliJ / etc. do this? Or is there a special tool that enables remote java compilation, also that makes use of multiple processors? It need not be free/open source. </p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately our laptops MUST run a (company managed) Windows Vista, so another reason to go for the separate server computer is to let us use linux on it and finally get rid of the annoying managed environment.</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> to sum up the answers so far, one way to shorten build times is to leave compilation for the developers individually (because compiling is supposed to be fast), skip running unit tests and hot-deploy (without packaging) to the container.</p>
  
  <p>Then, when the developer decides to check his/her code in, a continuous integration server (such as Hudson) is triggered to clean &amp; build &amp; run tests &amp; package &amp; deploy.</p>
  
  <p><strong>SOLUTION</strong>: I've accepted Thorbjørn's answer since I think that's going to be the closest to which way I'm planning to proceed. Although out of curiosity I'm still interested in solving the original problem (=remote Java compiling)...</p>