Every time when our development team modifies a Web application's source code, we need to build a EAR, login to WebSphere's deployment manager, update the the whole application in our testing server and start the application again.
But sometimes the change may only involve a single Java file. Are there any alternative ways to deploy the change to the testing server to speed up our development life cycle like just copy the XXX.class to a particular location in the WebSphere folder?
You can do what is known as Hot Deployment for Websphere applications. But in this you would not be changing/deploying a .class file, at the very least you would need a .jar file which is changing. But the procedure to have this set up is closely bound with the Application in question. And it cannot be put into a single post on StackOverflow, since it would belong on a tutorial website and this is not one.
I suggest you read about Hot Deployment on IBM Knowledge center. This would help you cause, if you are willing to follow the steps in the the page.
Note: Not affiliated to IBM.
Just a further suggestion: Use Hot Deployment procedure as advised above and documented here.
In step 4 set the "Polling interval for updated files" to zero (0) to disable dynamic reloading. This will entail that, after hot deploying an application artifact, you must restart the application to realize the change rather than rely on the application server to poll for changes through the deployed modules and then restart either a web module or the entire application, depending on which part changed. Manually restarting the application is generally faster than dynamic reloading.
Finally, setting the polling interval to zero will not impact the dynamic reloading of JSPs.
