There are two options.
First, Eclipse lets you do this, with a slight change of configuration (see also this detailed post)
- add Tomcat to the server list
- make the project “Dynamic web project” (Either through the creation wizard or through the facets section in the settings)
- add the project to tomcat, and configure its “Deployment assembly”
- double click tomcat from the list to open the configurations
- Change “Publishing” to “Never publish automatically” (this means the server won’t get restarted when you hit ctrl+s)
- start tomcat in debug mode
This will still reflect code changes but won’t restart the server.
Second, I’ve used the FileSync plugin for a long time:
- configure the plugin to send all classes from the bin director to
WEB-INF/classesof your tomcat installation (this is almost the same as configuring the deployment assembly) - configure all other resources to go to their respective locations
- optionally, externalize all absolute paths from the filesync location settings to a single variable, and configure that variable in eclipse (thus you will be able to commit the filesync settings as well, if all members are using eclipse)
- add Tomcat to the Servers list in eclipse, configure the “Server locations” option to be “Use tomcat installation” (the screen opens when you double-click tomcat from the servers list)
- start tomcat in debug mode
It works perfectly for me that way. Every non-structural change is reflected immediately, without redeploy.
Update:
You can read more about the methods for hot-deploying here.
I also created a project that easily syncs the workspace with the servlet container.