All of us have felt the pain waiting for the web-container to reload after just a minor change to the code. Well, recently i came across JavaRebel from ZeroTurnaround and they seem have solved our problem! And if you, as most of us, enjoy Spring you’ll also enjoy their Spring plug-in to monitor your context-files.
As they put it:
JavaRebel is a developer tool that will reload changes to compiled Java classes on-the-fly saving the time that it takes to redeploy an application or perform a container restart. It is a generic solution that works for Java EE and Java standalone applications.!
Promise me to have a look at their screancasts (found on the right hand side of the page). They also have a nice list of features and supported JVM’s and web-containers.
They also have a Google group that answers questions you may have.
I haven’t tried it yet but am truely looking forward to it:-)
And if you do, please post a comment and let me know how it went.