Do have to restart Tomcat every time I recompile a bean?

Created May 4, 2012

JIA Java Italian Association

It depends on how the context of your application its configured (check the reload attribute in the Context tag of tomcat configuration (normally conf/server.xml), and where that bean it's located. If the bean it's located in the WEB-INF/classes or WEB-INF/lib of your application and the reload attribute is set to true, no, you do not really need to restart. If the beans are in the common tomcat directory ($tomcat_home/lib or $tomcat_home/classes), yes you have to.

Be careful when you recompile beans without restarting. Sometimes you can get ClassCastExceptions if you try to use beans previously stored in a session or application scope.