Deploying a Alfresco application through Eclipse

Question

I'm developing an application which will eventually get its data from Alfresco with CMIS or REST. My current workflow of deploying is: zip all the files in my project and then rename it from project.zip to project.war, then copying it to my alfresco tomcat webapps folder and then wait till tomcat deploys it (because Alfresco is already running).

My question is if there is a way so that development becomes much faster? Because i tried it with a second tomcat in Eclipse but the ports were always being used, even if i changed the ports being used by Alfresco or the ports being used by Eclipse it still gave the same error.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

As Gagravarr said, the preferred solution is to deploy an AMP. You can avoid all of the hassle of setting that up yourself by using the Alfresco Maven SDK (tutorial). Then it is super easy to simply do a mvn install and it builds your AMP. You can even use mvn alfresco:install to install the AMP into your alfresco WAR and share WAR.

You may also want to look at this presentation from last year's Alfresco Summit. It shows how to use something like JRebel to do hot deploys of your Java code into your running repository.