Incremental hot deployment on Tomcat with Maven and NetBeans

Question

I'm using NetBeans 6.8, Tomcat 6, and Maven 2.2 and want to see changes in my code immediately in the browser (showing http://localhost:8080) after saving the file.

The tomcat-maven-plugin has the following configuration:

<plugin>
  <groupId>org.codehaus.mojo</groupId>
  <artifactId>tomcat-maven-plugin</artifactId>
  <version>1.0-beta-1</version>
</plugin>

Following to the output it should perform in-place deployment.

What can I do to see changes in my Java code immediately in the browser?

Answer 1

I spent a lot of time trying to get this work. Finally I just used jetty. I put this:

   <plugin>
            <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
            <artifactId>jetty-maven-plugin</artifactId>
            <version>${jetty.version}</version>
            <configuration>
                <reload>automatic</reload>
                <scanIntervalSeconds>5</scanIntervalSeconds>
            </configuration>
   </plugin>

Maybe all parameters are not correct, but then I created a custom goal of 'jetty:run' And I use that. I can't use the big green play button 'Run', but the jetty deploy works nicely and it hot deploys any changes in the Java classes.