Hot Deploy for JBoss on Eclipse 3.4: Ganymede

Question

Hello,

I am using Ganymede (Eclipse 3.4) to do some Java EE based web development targeting a JBoss 4.2 application server.

I have always liked Eclipse very much for a Java editor. The thing is, for Java EE is not as useful as one might think. It's buggy, deployment and debugging is very slow, and you have to re-deploy your Java EE application every time you make a little change. That makes development unbearable.

My question is: Is there a plugin that will make my life easier by adding HOT DEPLOY to Ganymede when developing JBoss Applications?

Answer 1

Yes, you can use JBoss tools:

http://www.jboss.org/tools

I've used this when developing on JBoss using Eclipse 3.4, it works well although there are still some bugs in the plugin. Overall though it's better.

Update site for 3.4.2 is:

http://download.jboss.org/jbosstools/updates/stable/

EDIT: Also, if you're running on Redhat you can download JBoss Developer Studio which is "guaranteed" to provide a development environment that is stable and deployable. I've not used it, but interested to see whether it lives up to those claims:

http://www.jboss.com/products/devstudio/

Answer 2

You can do this out of the box with remote debugging. Connect the Eclipse debugger to JBoss and when you make a code change it will be hot-patched where possible.

There's a tutorial on doing so here

Answer 3

I'm using Jboss Tools and Eclipse 3.4.2 and normally I'm able to replace code inside any method and see the changes on the server when running in debug mode, but at some point it stops working, and the Debugger shows me "old lines", for my breakpoints and does not reflect the new lines I'm adding or "remembers" the old ones(acctually only remembers the line number, even when the lines are no longer there). I've tried starting eclise with "-clean", restart, clean all projects, full publish/redeploy, and sometimes I can debug and make hot changes again, but most of the times I can't, once the problem firs appear. The only "solution" I've found, is to have a fresh copy of my workspace to replace the failed one. Any ideas? The .metadata always get bigger, kind of la Windows registry. Is there a way of REALLY clean it without having to create a new one?