Automatic Code reloading in Ring / Jetty

Question

Using Ring / Jetty with Clojure, when I make any changes to my code, I have to reload my entire JVM.

Is there anyway of keeping Jetty asynchronous with changes in my code, so I can simply refresh the browser window and get changes immediately?

Specifically, I'm using Hiccup for HTML Parsing, and it's mainly changes in layout I'm making.

It would be a huge timesaver if layout changes were automatically compiled and available in browser on refresh.

Does anyone have any information on that? Are there any solutions?

Answer 1

You might want to check out lein-ring specifically :auto-reload? and :auto-refresh? options.

Answer 2

As an alternative to the auto-reload features in ring, if you're using a repl-enabled development system, like emacs + nrepl or counterclockwise (if you don't, you should try one to see the difference it makes), you can just re-evaluate specific definitions or files directly from the editor into the running system. IMO it's a far superior workflow than save + (auto-)reload. I use emacs/nrepl.el and I've never had any use for auto-reloading.