Nobody seems to have mentioned it, but I have been developing with Eclipse's Dynamic Web Projects, and it has greatly shortened my development cycle from when I was loading the project into Tomcat through the manager web interface. Basically, a DWP is able to run the server itself, and it automatically republishes a new build and restarts the server in the background. Even when I have to start it myself, it is fast, and I don't have to leave the Eclipse interface. More importantly, I am able to run my code in debug, allowing me to set breakpoints etc. I don't have enough experience with the other solutions to compare it, but it sure beats manual deployment and restarting the server every time you want to try a new build.
DWP is built into Eclipse, not requiring any additional plug-ins. You just create the project as a DWP and take it from there. I ported a different project's web code into the DWP simply by copying over the relevant code, and making changes needed to build. The directory layout corresponds roughly to the internal structure of the resulting WAR file, so it's pretty easy to figure out where different files should go. When you want to create a WAR file for use outside the project, you just export the project to a WAR. Debugging and building can all be performed using Eclipses standard menu options. The only trick is that you have to create a server for your DWP, and you want to point that instance to an actual installed instance of Tomcat or JBoss. This presents you with new artifact on the Package View, and you might want to open up the Server View window for control over it (start, stop and publish are the main things to do here). That's all there is to it. On Fri, May 21, 2010 at 11:53 AM, ekallevig <[email protected]> wrote: > > I'm a front-end developer trying to learn Java (total n00b) and working on > a > wicket application at work. The whole process feels very slow primarily > because I have to recompile and restart JBoss every time I make a change. > So I'm wondering what the best way is to avoid having to do this when > editing .java/.js/.css/.html files during development? I'd like to just > make > changes and then refresh the browser to test -- is this possible? >
