Fast development

What is fast development of plugins? Fast development allows developers to work with exploded plugin WARs instead of having to package them for deployment. For example, if you change JSP files in a plugin, these JSP files will be modified when you refresh the page in your browser. Furthermore, if you update other files (for example, JSF pages, Java beans, servlets, and so on) besides JSP files, these files will automatically be reloaded by the class loader of Tomcat. Obviously, this will save a lot of development time.

How do we make it happen? Firstly, you need to add a new Ant target deploy-exploded inside the file $PLUGINS_SDK_HOME/build-common-plugin.xml as follows:

// after <target name="deploy" depends="war">
// <copy file="${plugin.file}" todir="${auto.deploy.dir}" />
// </target>, add following lines:
<antelope:stringutil string="${basedir}/${plugin.name}.xml"
property="plugin.context.file">
<antelope:replace regex="\\" replacement="/" ...