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Maven Incremental hot deploy - a plugin for the Eclipse IDE
There are different ways how to deploy a Java EE application into an application server like Glassfish or JBoss. You can deploy your application using a command line tool or a web interface provided by your sever. Or you can use the autodeploy feature which means that you simply copy your application into a specific folder of your server.
The Eclipse IDE provides a plugin called "Web Tools Plattform" (WTP) which supports the hot deployment functionality for some application and web servers. But if you are using the Maven build tool the Ecipse WTP feature did not integrate smoothly with the maven project structure. So in most cases the hot deployment feature will get lost and the development will become time intensive and frustrating. This is the moment where manik-hot-deploy comes into play. manik-hot-deploy is an Eclipse plugin which supports hotdeployment functionality for your maven java enterprise project. It is easy to configure and speed-up the development of web and enterprise applications.
Most application servers like GlassFish or JBoss/WildFly are supporting two different modes of automatic deployment. The autodeployment and the hotdeplyoment (also called incremental deployment).
Autodeployment means that you simply copy a web- (.war) or enterprise application (.ear) into a specific directory of our application server. For Glassfish this is the folder:
..[GLASSFISH_INSTALL]/glassfish/domains/domain1/autodeploy/
for WildFly Server this is the folder:
..[WILDFLY_INSTALL]/standalone/deployments/
When you copy an application artifact (.ear or .war) into that directory your server will automatically detect the new artefact and starts a deployment process. If the application was already deployed before a redeployment will be started.
In different to autodeplyoment the hotdeplyoment (or incremental deployment) will not deploy the whole application but parts of your application which are updated or changed during development. This is a powerful feature which can save you a lot of time during development. Incremental deployment means, that in the moment when you are changing a web resource (like a .xhtml, .jsf or .css files) this change is immediately transferred into your deployed and running application. So there is no need to build and redeploy the application.