I'm trying to improve the speed of development loop of changing code, rebuilding, redeploying, testing.

Pointers to any resources to speed up this process appreciated.

1) Is there a programatic way of sending a message to the major deployers (WAR, JAR, HAR, EAR) to deploy, redeploy, undeploy a file URI ?

2) Is there a programtic way to receive back a general status of that request and any error message back to an ANT help class that handles the messaging ? This would also allow ANT to deploy synchronously so that once ANT exited I can be sure I can start testing. This would also allow deployment status to be received into Eclipse.

3) I believe JBoss can work with an exploded WAR/JAR/HAR/EAR directory ? Since there is no file to present / remove for the usual hot deployment mechanics to work, can JBoss be programatically told to redeploy (and therefore flush all classes, etc..) the exploded tree?

4) Can Tomcat work with exploded trees too ?