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

Some application servers do support redeployment without interruption of service. This is at least true for WebLogic, see Using Production Redeployment to Update Applications. Note that this is not hot deploy (and I would NEVER use hot deploy with production servers).

Without application server support, I'm afraid you won't be able to do real "smooth" redeployments. If you want to minimize downtime, one approach is to deploy the new application in parallel (on the same server or another one) and to change the routing rules when done. But clients will loose their session.