I'm in favor of that too (both exploded deployments and pointers) A lot of the commercial servers let you keep your components anywhere on the local filesystem -- you just give it a filepath when you first deploy and then update the files in place to hot deploy. I've used that a lot in development and it's pretty convenient. Being able to also pull in EJBs from a separate framework project would be very interesting.
Another thread talked about needing more than the "drop-in" deployment. I think this pointer route should definitely be explored. From: "Nicholas Barratt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Of course, for even more friendly configuration deployment, you don't > want to have to build at all! Supporting unpackaged jars/rars/ears/etc > is part of the equation. The other part (which I haven't seen in the > past) is to allow an archive to be replaced by a pointer file. This > would alow me to have each of my J2EE components in a seperate project > with no build step at all! Just update and go.
