I'm developing a Ruby web application on top of GAE-Java and development is painfully slow because in Eclipse I must restart the development server every time I make a change to my Ruby code. I'm not able to work effectively this way because each restart takes about a minute.
Is the norm for Java development or am I doing something wrong?
Hopefully there's a simple solution to this that I'm not aware of?
It's certainly not normal for 'general' Java development using application servers. Most app servers will support some form of hot deployment (e.g. at the moment I'm using both Jetty and Tomcat, and they will restart the appropriate application upon redeployment of the .war file - i.e. copying the .war to the deployment directory).
GAE is still in its infancy. I went to google io and people using jruby for GAE were saying that they dont use the dev environment at all because it was too different from the real environment. They literally deployed their app to GAE to test it.