I am doing development of a web app with Java. My current process is to export the project as a WAR to the Tomcat folder, where it picks it up and reloads the WAR. I wait for it to run through its startup process and away it goes.
I would like to make it not need to do an entire reload when it isn't necessary. If I'm making a small change to a single class, perhaps it could reload just that class. If I'm changing static content, perhaps it could just send that HTML file or JS file.
How can I achieve this? My only real dealbreakers is that I need a solution that works with Eclipse. I'd even consider a different container than Tomcat, although it's where I'm familiar.
You can hot reload/deploy your application inside Eclipse , but for seperate Tomcat server , I don't think hot reload is possible .
For eclipse , you can follow the instructions in this link https://mkyong.com/eclipse/how-to-configure-hot-deploy-in-eclipse/
This will speed up your development , but it has it's limitations
Hot deploy will support the code changes in the method implementation only. If you add a new class or a new method, restart is still required.
I haven't tried it , but all the class files of war will be loaded/rendered from binary memory of Tomcat . So try changing the class files in that location(Not sure about the path of binary class folder ) .
But if you want to render static HTML,js and css from tomcat server , it can be easily done adding another folder inside "webapps" folder (eg : /webappps/static)