Light Java servlet container for development

Question

I'm looking for a light-weight and simple servlet container for rapid development. For example I want to write Java code without recompiling every time to see the changes in the browser. And I don't care for the servlet to be able to handle thousands of concurrent requests since I only need to install it on my local Windows machine and I will be the only one accessing it.

I'd like this sort of thing for development, so that I can upload my war to my "live" servlet container that has a more mature servlet container (Tomcat etc).

Does anything like this exist?

Answer 1

Jetty with the Jetty Maven plugin will be your guiding light.

[EDIT]:
Original link was dead. Updated to new jetty-maven-plugin home.

Answer 2

The most lightweight servlet container that I'm aware of is Jetty. I'm not aware of any servlet container that provides automatic reloading of classes, but you can achieve this using the JRebel IDE plugin. JRebel is not free, but it's cheap, and well worth the money.