Deployment of a J2EE web app

Question

Is there a way to deploy apps without deploying it as a war file? At the moment I am repackaging and redeploying the war after every change. Is there a way to host it like IIS so changes can be done to an individual file without having to repackage and redeploy. Im using glassfish at the moment

Answer 1

Glassfish permits deploying applications and modules in an exploded directory format. It also supports automatic deployment and dynamic reloading.

Answer 2

You can hot deploy few things. By hot deploy I mean replacing the file not full app. Like hot deploying a jsp file, some static content there might be some more things. But then there are other things which may not work properly if you try to just replace a file.

Having said that it's not a recommended practice in most production environments. Most people would like to deploy a full war file.

But if you are simply looking for productivity in development environment you can use tools like JRebel. It works great. You don't have to keep deploying the war file again and again.

Answer 3

With Tomcat, you can configure the container to serve a webapp that is located in another directory (such as your build target directory) using a config file found under tomcat/conf/Catalina/localhost

But, you generally need to restart Tomcat if you make changes other than static content or JSP changes.

This sort of approach should be restricted to development environments only.

Answer 4

I agree with Laird Nelson that GlassFish can do that the reason is that Glassfish use Apache Felix which is an OSGI implementation (OSGi Framework and Service platform). Here you can find projects using felix. If you are using a simple Servlet Container like Tomcat there a lot of solutions.