I’ve done a lot of front-end java coding over my career, one particularly annoying aspect is the wait for a build (compile-deploy) cycle in my local developement servers to view or test a small change. One particularly useful tool that I’ve been using for some time is a FileSync plugin for Eclipse. It is useful as you can “map” folders from your Eclipse project to a path on your local filesystem, as such the individual files are automatically copied to your server installation. I’ve personally used this approache with JBoss, Tomcat and WebSphere, but there is no reason that it should not work for other servers.