Howto to hot deploy only parts of exploded EAR file

[arubamalice]

Apologies if this subject has been posted before but I have searched through the forums and not found an answer.

I am using JBoss 4.0.4. The project I am working on deploys an exploded EAR folder.
The name of the exploded EAR folder is MyTestApp.ear (example name).
This EAR file contains an exploded web app (MyWebApp.war) and an exploded JAR file (MyClasses.jar)

So the top level folder structure is

MyTestApp.ear
+--META-INF
+--MyWebApp.war
+--MyClasses.jar

The MyWebApp.war and MyClasses.jar components are correctly referenced in the META-INF/application.xml file as web and java modules
respectively.

Now every time I do a build and update the META-INF/application.xml, JBoss correctly auto deploys the whole ear file.

The problem is that my application uses Spring and various other components. Hence the build and deploy time can take up to
two minutes which is really frustrating when making minor changes to only the classes in the MyClasses.jar file.

Is there a way for me to onlyhot deploy the MyClasses.jar file and get JBoss to reload all the classes in this JAR, without deploying
the whole EAR file?

If anyone has any advice this would be appreciated.


Ayub M

[starksm64]

No as the ear is a hiearchical type system. jboss5 will move towards a class loading model that can support this, but until then its not practical.

[arubamalice]

I have been digging around the JBoss API documentatin and come across the UnifiedClassLoader and LoaderRepository files.

I don't suppose there is a hack to basically connet to Jboss (using a jmx client) and tell it to load the cached MyClasses.jar?

In this case I would not update the application.xml