ant deployment issues

i am looking to make our deployments here not suck and i need some help, if you can help me with these few things i owe you beer

right now whenever i make a change thats not to the jsps i need to clean-including-tomcat otherwise my change doesnt take. this is really annoying.

any clues as to what i can change to make it work?

my current build is really simple, just the regular old, javac, war, deploy one thing that isnt done is that there is no build dir, the project itself contains a web-inf and the javac is done in place, then the war excludes all the .jav开发者_如何学Pythona resources and wars the project.

edit: I am looking to fix this problem with least amount of effort - so while switching to maven and learning how to use it might solve this problem, but it will create another problem ;)

You've already identified some of the weaknesses, in your current build.
The easiest way that I can suggest to clean it up would be to start with the directory structure.

I highly recommend using the maven directory structure, I would go further to suggest using maven as a build tool instead of ant, however for some folk that remains open for debate.
The maven directory structure has been well thought out, I really like working on projects that use the maven directory structure, because they follow a convention that allows me to save a lot of time, by knowing from previous experience where to find the application components

• java source
• unit test source
• resources etc.

Also by following the convention, the maven plugins work with less configuration required.

Another useful advantage that I get from working on maven based projects is good code metrics, to measure the health of the application. There are various report available as maven plugins, which will give you new insight into your codebase, including:

• checkstyle
• pmd
• findbugs
• and more.

Created a build directory where everything got copied before build

Added some flags to not copy over things that rarely change, like images (also to not remove them on clean)

Started using ant-reload task after deploying code

Now i don't need to restart tomcat on every build, and build takes much less time.