Eclipse & uncompressed wars

[E Robb]

I am using Eclipse and Jboss 4.2. I would like eclipse to create an uncompressed war that jboss can read so every time I update a jsp a new compressed war does not need to be deployed to jboss for me to see the changes.

Does anyone have any good links on hot deployment & Eclipse? I have been googling for hours and dont see any information on how to make eclipse use an uncompressed war.

I see some information on symbolic links and MKlink /j but dont fully understand the deployment strategy.

Thanks,
Earl

[Peter Johnson]

Do you have JBoss Tools installed? I'm not 100% sure, but I think that with JBoss Tools, when you deploy and app it uses an exploded format and thus on a redeploy it copies only the changed files.

The other option which I have used in the past is to use an Ant script to build my app and deploy it as an exploded app. The <copy> task will then copy over only updated JSP files.

[Tim Holloway]

As Peter has noted, the technical term for "uncompressed WAR" is "exploded WAR". The J2EE standard doesn't actually support exploded WARs, but many webapp servers either support them, explode WARs internally for their own convenience or both. JBoss uses the Tomcat server for its servlet and JSP functions, and Tomcat supports exploded WARs. The process involves creating a directory with the same name as the WAR file (minus the ".war" extension) and unzipping the WAR into that directory. Tomcat will then pick up on any updates to the files in that directory, although it's not an instant process since Tomcat detects changes via periodic scans of the WAR.

If you update certain files (such as web.xml), Tomcat will shutdown and restart the webapp. JSP updates simply cause a recompilation of the affected JSP.

[E Robb]

Well yes I understand how to use "exploded WAR" and the server set up. There is no issue there.

My question is, is there any way work with Eclipse and have it not create a compressed war. The issue here is everytime I want to see a jsp change eclipse deploys a compressed war to my jboss deploy directory. Which is all fine and dandy but it eats up my JVM and causes perm gen errors.

It would be helpful if there was some way I could work out of an uncompressed directory in eclipse so jsp changes would be seen by both eclipse and jboss without having to redeploy a compressed war. Because of Eclipses directory structure I dont see any logical way of doing that.

Im probably missing something simple here but do you redeploy a compressed war for every little jsp change you make? lets say in eclipse on a jsp I want to change <i>italics</i> to <b>bold</b> do you then redeploy the entire compressed war just to see that one text change?

Thanks for the help.

Earl