Fast Servlet development with Maven and Jetty

On off the biggest problems with developing servlets under a
container like Tomcat is the amount of time taken to build your code,
deploy it to the container and restart it to pick up any changes. Maven
and the Jetty plugin allow you to cut down on this cycle considerably.
The first step is to allow you to start your application in maven by
running:

mvn jetty:run

We do this by configuring the jetty plugin inside our
pom.xml:

<plugin>
   <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>6.1.10</version>
</plugin>

Now when you run mvn jetty:run your application will start
up. But we can improve on this. The Jetty plugin can be configured to
scan your project every so often and rebuild it and reload it if
anything changes. We do this by changing our pom.xml to read:

<plugin>
   <groupId>org.mortbay.jetty</groupId>
   <artifactId>maven-jetty-plugin</artifactId>
   <version>6.1.10</version>
   <configuration>
      <scanIntervalSeconds>10</scanIntervalSeconds>
   </configuration>
</plugin>

Now when you save a file in your IDE, by the time you’ve switched to
your web browser, Jetty is already running your updated code. Your
development cycle is almost up to the same speed as Perl or PHP.

You can find more information at the plugin page.