I'm playing on a Java EE application using heavily javascript, a RIA application. Do you have any tip/best practice about speed up javascript developing process instead of change javascript, build a .war and deploy the app on the AS to see if my javascript is fine?
3 Answers
Seeing other answers I feel like I have to write this: Just run the application from your IDE.
For example with Eclipse+Tomcat your changes will be automatically published without the need to rebuild or redeploy. You can even use tools like spring-loaded (or more advanced but commercial JRebel) to have Java class live-reloading as well.
Comments
I have had good experiences using some lightweight AppServer like Jetty. You just need to put a starter somewhere in your project (for example in a test-project that doesn't deploy to the endsystem).
Then you can even configure what to deploy on the small server, for example, make a starter for each small module you might work on. Then, if you have proper dependency management, you can inject "fake" dependencies for third-party services and have a really fast and easy to use environment.
However, setting up such a solution is not something you can do in a few minutes, but once you have it, it will save tons of time!
Consider using a small proxy-server (apache, nginx) to run on localhost:8080 and use it as a proxy for your application, with one exception: the javascript/frontend code which you point to your workspace.
In nginx for example, you would use the location directive to configure this. See also: http://nginx.org/en/docs/beginners_guide.html#proxy
example configuration:
server {
listen 8080;
location / {
proxy_pass http://<application server> ;
}
location /js/ {
root /<path to javascript>;
}
}
.js.mvn installdoes (installs built artifact in your local repo~/.m2). But you made it off-topic now :).