We develop a huge set of OSGi bundles based on Equinox and start it within Eclipse with a "OSGi Framework" launch configuration. The start of the framework with all necessary bundles and data takes 1-2 minutes which is the reason why we used DCEVM and JRebel to hot-deploy changed classes.
Now with Java 8 these methods do not work properly any more (DCEVM is available for Java 7 only, and JRebel has too many limitations - freezing debug sessions, no support for added instance fields etc). Since our application is quite modular, I imagine an Eclipse function (via plugin?) that monitors the workspace for class changes and restarts the affected bundles after the incremental build is finished.
Are you aware of some tooling that might help for this task?
Bndtools provides such an environment. It is also superior to the eclipse plugin perspective in a lot of other ways. For example it has great support for declarative services.