Can JBoss auto un-WAR when deploying?

[babygodzilla]

I know that in Tomcat when you deploy a WAR file, that file is automatically un-WARed so you can see and edit its contents. This is very convenient when you want to change a property thats in a text file, such as a .property file, and then simply reload, rather than making the change and then re-WARing and redeploying.

can this be done in JBoss? thanks

[peterj]

Yes, see http://wiki.jboss.org/wiki/Wiki.jsp?page=ExplodedDeployment

[babygodzilla]

hmmm so that looks like I still have to un-archive manually?

To explode a J2EE archive, unzip the archive to a directory that is named the same as the archive file.

[peterj]

Maybe. Depends on your build process. Maven2 gathers all war contents into a directory in one step and packages those contents into a war file in the next step. My Ant scripts follow the same pattern. Deploying then becomes copying the directory.

Or if your Ant script packages the war file from disparate locations, you can use the unzip/unjar task to explode the file into the deploy directory.