Smart deploy... ?Help?

Question

I'm running JDev10g preview with the included OC4J container. I've made a WAR deployment profile in order to deploy my project to the container.
The problem is that to test the project, which is a 3tier application, I need to wait for the deployment to finish each time I've made changes to the code. This is quite frustrating.
I would like to just compile the code directlly to the container, and just restart it. But my OC4J reads server classes and servs client classes from two different locations.
I've tried changing the applet deployment paths to where the server reads it's files, but OC4J didn't like this very much.
What should I do? I would like a tree structure something like this:
<application>\
..WEB-INF\ (usually just server files)
....classes\ (server & client classes)
I know this can be done. Could anybody with a little more experience with OC4J please help?

Answer 1

WAR file directory structure defines how the deployed application is loaded by OC4J's classloaders. The WAR and EAR file structures are forced by EJB, Servlet and J2EE Specs. In deed this cannot be changed as every J2EE/Servlet Container excepts this structures and don't carries about loading violations.
In fact you have some influence on the classloading of the server, but only for depending JAR assebly e.g in order integrate Toplink or a other O/R Mapping framework.
The only way to deploy a application inside OC4J comes with WAR and EAR. You can define OC4J Specific startup classes.
OC4J is really not bad, but you cannot extend services in the way JBoss does. I guess this will chance when the server integrates JMX more and more.
Start up classes are one way to work around. But I'm not sure if this classes are good for this purpose the are intetent for initialization only.
We currently use remote SessionBeans and test them by calling the remote methods of a deployed application on a client using JUnit test cases.
The are a couple of open source testing frameworks such as cactus which may provide a better test integration. I also suggest to use a build system like maven or ant to deploy your assemblies continuously.