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

Usually it's possible to optimize start-up time. Our web application starts with Jetty in 5-7 seconds. Other Java web servers are worse, because they start very slow.

Also, as I'm aware (not I did it), the front-end web server (such as apache, we use lighttpd) could be configured to hold request some period of time (up to 30 seconds on ours) while the Jetty is not ready. So, we just easily restart the Jetty while deploying, and users just have several seconds delay in worst case, which usually just looks like an Internet connection glitch.