Amazon Elastic BeanStalk, WAR Files, Hot Reloading

Question

I love the simplicity of Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.

However it seems rather difficult to hot-reload code. In particular, in reading about the WAR file format (Sun), it states:

One disadvantage of web deployment using WAR files in very dynamic environments is that minor changes cannot be made during runtime. Any change whatsoever requires regenerating and redeploying the entire WAR file.

This is bad. I like to program in Clojure, which involves lots of testing / code reloading.

My question: what is the right way to to hot code reloading in Amazon Elastic Beanstalk?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Do your development on a local instance of Tomcat, an IDE like IntelliJ will automatically update your changes. Once you have reached a reasonable milestone, e.g. completed a story, then redeploy your war.

Answer 2

I ended up giving the Amazon Elastic Beanstalk route, and just ended up setting EC2 instances.