Jetty/JBoss Code Redeployment Slow on Eclipse

I’ve downloaded Jetty Server Adapter for Eclipse recently. Jetty is supposedly very nimble Java-based HTTP Server and Servlet Container. I’m not sure if I’m doing it wrong, but I find code redeployment very slow and buggy when using Jetty on Eclipse. Even Jboss, another heavy duty application server, is bad on Eclipse with 15-25 second redeployment time.

So far I’ve found only Tomcat to be suitable for development with almost instant redeployment.

Another nuisance is that Jetty relies on the presence of PID file ( on my RHEL 4.2) to determine whether it’s running or not, which is, more often than not, inaccurate as I usually close Eclipse without shutting down Jetty server. Tomcat is much more stable in that sense. However, Jetty seems much more exciting to develop “for” (as opposed to “on”) as it has continuations, a very clever hack/feature.

I suppose that the preferred way to develop on Jetty is to use Maven, and Jetty Server Adapter will improve with future releases of WTP/Eclipse milestones.