java - What's an easy, quick way to reload a webapp in tomcat in dev environment?

Question

I'm running Tomcat 6 on Windows. I've got the "Monitor Tomcat" system tray icon which allows me to start and shutdown Tomcat, but is there another little tool that allows me to easily reload my web app when I've changed the class files? I know the "manager" app that comes with Tomcat has a redeploy option, but just wondering if there's a native app that would do this a bit quicker and nicer?

Answer 1

Assuming you've already set reloadable=true, you can touch either the war file in the webapps directory, or a monitored file such as WEB-INF/web.xml in the exploded application directory. This will update the time stamp and make the app look new, so it will be reloaded.

At our company, we run our Web app servers in dev mode all the time just to facilitate this. To hell with the recommendation, we know better than to run our app on 99% load so we can't spare a few cycles.