How to hot deploy JSP changes in maven app?

Question

I have a maven web application. I am using springsource tool suite and its built in tc fabric server.

Every time I make any changes I have to do mvn clean install and restart the server. Even for the JSP changes.

Is there any way I can just make JSP changes and they are reflected in the browser on refresh like a regular web app (not maven app).

I have searched over internet but no success as yet.

Still No clue about it. It makes the development process extremely slow. I looked into jrebel but its not free and I am not looking for hot deploy of classes but just the hot deploy of JSP's, javascripts, css etc.

Answer 1

I currently use a profile to copy JSPs to my target dir, which I call from Eclipse once i need the JSPs updated. You could also copy classfiles like this by adding executions.

<profile>
    <id>copyJsps</id>
    <build>
        <plugins>
            <plugin>
                <artifactId>maven-resources-plugin</artifactId>
                <version>2.5</version>
                <configuration>
                    <outputDirectory>${basedir}/target/app/WEB-INF/jsp</outputDirectory>
                    <resources>
                        <resource>
                            <directory>src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/jsp</directory>
                            <filtering>true</filtering>
                        </resource>
                    </resources>
                </configuration>
            </plugin>
        </plugins>
    </build>
</profile>

Use: mvn resources:copy-resources -PcopyJsps

Answer 2

You can use Eclipse Filesync plugin to achieve this. You can configure plugin to map maven output folder to Application server directory

I know this is not maven way but it works.

Maybe this question will give some more insights.

Answer 3

This is my simple solution (workaround?) while using JBoss on Linux. It should also be valid for Tomcat or any other container that supports exploaded war's.

1. Use mvn war:inplace to create an exploaded war in src/main/webapp. This will copy classes and lib there. You don't need to repeat this step if you're just changing JSP (or other /webapp/ files). Alternatively you can create symlinks to classes and lib in src/main/webapp/WEB-INF:

cd src/main/webapp/WEB-INF
ln -s ../../../../target/classes
mvn package
ln -s ../../../../target/*/WEB-INF/lib

2. In the deployment directory create a symlink to src/main/webapp:

cd $DEPLOYMEN_DIR
ln -s $MYAPP_DIR/src/main/webapp myapp.war

This makes changes to JSP and other webapp files instantly available. If you want to see the changes in your classes then you can trigger a reload of the application only my modifying web.xml. On you can run this script to monitor trigger the restart:

#!/bin/bash
while sleep 1; do 
    if [[ -n $(find WEB-INF/classes -newer WEB-INF/web.xml -type f) ]];then
        date
        touch WEB-INF/web.xml
    fi
done

Run it from the src/main/webapp/ directory.

Note on JBoss AS 7: Here to trigger a reload you need to create a myapp.war.dodeploy file instead of touching web.xml