Smooth redeployment of WAR in production?

Question

I was wondering if there is a \'smooth way\' of redeploying a Java WAR to a production server (no cluster, no OSGi)?

All I can come up with is stop server, update file,

Answer 1

You might have a look at JRebel, though I wouldn't use it in production. In production we do basically the same, though our boss keeps on dreaming of hot redeploys. Unfortunately they are supported mostly on paper - in most complex applications something always goes wrong with hot redeploys. The same is even truer for incremental hot redeploys...