Reduce war size for frequent redeployments(uploads) to a remote server

Question

While development I need to frequently update my web app source code & deploy the updated war to a remote Tomcat server. Uploading a big war(25MB) takes too long(around 30 min) on my connection which is very unproductive. Is there any way I could reduce the war size ? There are a lot of external dependencies in my project. Could I deploy just the changes(may be dependencies remain intact) ?

Answer 1

It depends how much control you have over the upload process. If you have remote access to the filesystem, the following should work:

• Upload the WAR
• Let Tomcat expand it
• Stop Tomcat
• Delete the WAR
• Start Tomcat
• Tomcat should run your app from the expanded directory
• Upload changed files only and replace the old ones in the expanded directory
• For static files, no further action is necessary
• If up update classes or JARs, you'll need to restart Tomcat