Eclipse server plugin: Full Publish vs Incremental Publish

Question

What is the difference between a full and incremental publish when deploying an enterprise application to a server (e.g. Glassfish or JBoss)?

I see several modules listed in the deployed artefacts tree, but when I use incremental publish on an web archive then something happens, but it is not deployed. With a full publish the whole EAR is deployed, the libs, the EJB archives and the WAR.

Answer 1

According to the JBoss Server Manager Reference Guide:

Full publish will force a full rebuild of the entire module

whereas:

Incremental Publish is meant to enable publishing of only those parts where changes have been made.

This makes it sound (to me at least) like they both ought to always work equally well in terms of publishing the latest build. However, as you've discovered, this doesn't seem to be the case.

Just a rule of thumb but in my experience, Incremental Publish works when the changes are to the front-end (e.g. Javascript, JSP etc.), whereas Full Publish is usually needed when there are back-end changes (e.g. entities, models etc.)