What's the ideal setup for a quick turnaround in Java EE development?

I'm currently struggling with the project setup while implementing a Java EE 6 application with Eclipse Indigo and 开发者_开发百科JBoss 6. The application server and the IDE is pretty much set in the project. Maven 3 is used and was the base for the setup by using the WELD archetype and creating a WAR.

Now, the problem is, that I'm very disappointed about the development turnaround. I don't have a working automatic redeploying within eclipse and often need to restart JBoss since it gets confused with the new publishing and then is not able to redeploy correctly. This is very frustrating and time consuming. (Plus I feel the smirks behind me from the guys preferring script languages.)

From earlier projects we were using Seam 2 and the project created by seam-gen came with a somewhat decent republishing, although I still had to do a manual application restart whenever I changed Java classes. Then, from playing around with Netbeans 7 and the integrated GlassFish 3.1 I found that automatic redeployment was working ok. And since Java EE 6 is very wide spread, I assume, there must be a better setup than I have now.

So with this post I hope to get some more insight in having a good project setup for fluent development of Java EE 6 based WAR projects on JBoss and eclipse - who can share some best practices?

Thanks a lot!

You should use JBoss Tools plugins for Eclipse. JBoss Tools 3.3M2 is compatible with Indigo and JBoss AS 7 (which is 10 times faster than JBoss 6 for redeploy).

Regarding an equivalent to Seam Gen with CDI, you should really take a look to Seam Forge which is included in JBoss Tools 3.3 now.

Finally I'm using Jrebel to reload class and configuration without restarting the server. But for now it doesn't work yet with JBoss AS 7, so if you stick with JBoss AS 6 it's a goof combination.

This might not be the answer to your question, but if you want Java and fast turnaround look at http://www.playframework.org/ your script colleagues will be astounded.

For Eclipse to work well, use Eclipse Java EE edition and then add the JBoss server adapter.

The usual WTP-tooling then works for automatic deployments etc.