Deploying without WAR/EAR?

[bi9kahuna]

We have developed a web application in Apache Tomcat, and are now looking at JBoss because of EJB3.0, and how simple it appears it will be to scale up our application as we grow.

We use Apache Cocoon to drive part of our website. The pages driven by cocoon are updated quite frequently by our web content staff. I've not gotten our application up and running on JBoss 4.04 AS, but I can only update these cocoon files by rebuilding the EAR file for our application.

Under Tomcat, all of the JSPs/cocoon files, simply sat in our webapps/ROOT directory, where we could update our cocoon files at wiill. Is there a way to do this with JBoss? Can I deploy files to my application without building my WAR/EAR file? Ideally, I can deploy this new content (driven by cocoon) without reloading my entire application (which appears to take about 30 seconds on my test jboss machine).

Thanks for any advice.

-Scott

[peterj]

I haven't worked with Cocoon so I don't know how soemthing built with Coccon is deployed, but maybe this will help.

Deploy your app as an exploded set of files within directories, rather than packaged up within war and ear files. For example, assume you have xxx.ear which contains aaa.war and bbb.war. Under the deploy directory, create a directory named xxx.ear. In that directory create two more directories aaa.war and bbb.war. Into those directories place the contents of the two war files. Also, in the xxx.ear directory place the rest of the contents that would have been in the ear file, such as the META-INF/application.xml file.

Now, for example, you can easily add deploy/xxx.ear/bbb.war/some-new-file.html or edit deploy/xxx.ear/bbb.war/some-file.jsp.

[bi9kahuna]

Perfect! This is exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much, Peter. :)

-Scott