How do you develop JSF apps?

Question

I'm working for the first time on a project that requires building a webapp which makes heavy use of JSF (and ICEfaces in particular). There's a mix of stuff to be coded including CSS, HTML, JSP/Java and, of course, JSF.

I'm doing all this within Eclipse btw and using a local tomcat server which eclipse is responsible for launching in order to run the app.

Anyway, I notice all this is rather painfully slow. When I change one piece of JSF I have to restart the webserver so I can view the new results. Often I'm just interested in playing with the layout and the 10-15+ seconds it takes to stop, restart, refresh is driving me crazy. I reboot tomcat a hundred times a day -- argh! I need quicker turnaround!

Am I doing something wrong? Is this the natural state for all you web developers?

Answer 1

I am developing my applications in JSF with almost the same configuration (Tomcat 5.5 run by my Eclipse 3.3 with JBoss Tools). I am using also Facelets for JSF, and there is an important context parameter in web.xml I can to set in order to be able to modify my XHTML files with an automatic refresh (i.e. I don't need to restart Tomcat to see my changes). So, in my web.xml, I have this:

<context-param>
    <param-name>javax.faces.FACELETS_REFRESH_PERIOD</param-name>
    <param-value>1</param-value>
</context-param>