scanning unpacked deployment units outside the jboss server

[joris77]

Hi,

I'm developing war deployment units for JBoss 4.0.2 all the time. One of the bottlenecks for developer productivity is the code deploy test cycle (probably most people feel this).

Jetty now has this plugin for maven2 which automatically reloads the jetty server when something changes in your source directory. It looks directly at the src/main/webapp folder and the target/classes folder. Very handy and it would save me a lot of time.

I tried to have the same effect with jboss by pointing the deployment scanner to my web folder in my workspace, changing the jboss-service.xml. Letting eclipse compile directly to the web-inf/classes folder I was able to deploy the exploded war from my workspace. But the only problem is, I quote from the comment in the jboss-service.xml:

URLs may be local (file:) or remote (http:). Scanning is supported
for remote URLs but unpacked deployment units are not.

So redeployment is not possible !?

Another problem was that I had to rename my web folder to web.war.

My questions are:

Are there currently any plans to support such functionality (I don't mean the maven plugin)?

Is it very difficult to implement/contribute a deployer or deploymentscanner that does such a thing for development purposes?

Such a thing = configure a directory where the exploded war lives and reload it when:
option 1 the way jboss does it currently with exploded wars in the deploy directory when the web.xml is touched
option 2 the jetty way scanning the WEB-INF classes or another class directory configured

Thanks anyway,

Joris

[bill.burke]

so you're using your IDE with a remote jboss instance? If you ran JBoss locally, you'd have no problems with unexploded.

But...

In JBoss 4 kernel you can only watch one file.

[joris77]

Bill,

Thanks for the quick reply.

No I don't deploy remotely I misunderstood the text. Ok so that constraint is only applicable if you deploy remotely?

You say

In JBoss 4 kernel you can only watch one file.

I see so it only scans one directory the deploy directory (the first directory that is configured).

I switched my directory to be the first configured like this:

<attribute name="URLs">
 file:///c:/application_data/workspace_dir/project_dir/,deploy/
</attribute>

And now it works.

I still have one question:

Is JBoss 5.0 going to have a feature like jetty?

Thanks anyway,

Joris