What does Exploded Development mean? (In Java)

Question

I came across the term "exploded development" on this site...

http://www.zeroturnaround.com/javarebel/support-matrix/

and remembered hearing it before in relation to working with Java web applications. From what I can tell it is something to do with deploying your .war file as an extracted/raw set of files. Instead of using an ANT/Maven task to deploy a war file to the application server each time you want to try your code changes you are telling the application server to server the contents of a folder where the contents of the war are deployed "raw".

Am I on the right track? If anybody has a solid understanding of what this term means and the implications of using it that would be great.

Answer 1

Yes exploded means than instead of deploying a WAR/EAR file to your application server to test your application you point your application server at a folder containing the unzipped (exploded) contents of what would be inside the WAR/EAR file.

This makes development quicker as most application servers support Hot Deploy where you can change the code/JSPs etc and these changes will be reflected almost immediately in the running application.

The Tomcat plugin in Eclipse essentially uses this technique. The only thing to be careful of is that after many hot deploys most application servers start to run out of memory in the PermGen space and need restarting (well i've had this problem with Weblogic and Tomcat).

Answer 2

I also noticed under the FAQ on JavaRebel's website it explains it (not as detailed though)...

http://www.zeroturnaround.com/javarebel/faq/#What_is_exploded_and_packaged