Thanks Valentin.
I agree. The benefits are in hot deploying a new version of the EAR.
I think the main issue I need to address is making sure that only the classes that have changed are recompiled.
The problem arises from the fact that if I rebuild all the classes, something "potentially" could have changed, despite the fact that the source hasn't changed apart from the sources being patched.
Besides, the ear is always going to change as new stubs etc will have to be generated for potentially changed classes.
I think we ideally wanted to have a clean, tested EAR file that remains untouched - which therefore doesn't require retesting - hence the requirement to be able to add a separate patch.jar. A fair enough request methinks, but perhaps slightly off track for
J2EE development ?