For what I know Eclipse doesn't support nested dependencies.
That's how I see it too yes.
I've done it with maven support but this simply adds a list of projects / jars into "Deployment Assembly" of the webapp.
Yes - so same configuration as if you just used plain eclipse/WTP for it.
This way Tomcat adapter restarts when a deep dependency changes, say webapp -> dep1 -> dep2, when something inside dep2 changes the application is restarted.
I'm confused - now you are saying that Eclipse supports nested dependencies and trigger restart ? (note: might possibly be tomcat adapter specific)
The restart feature can be controlled per application in Server Properties and then Modules tab -> "Auto reload" column. When the restart is disabled then it works just like "Incremental publish" in JBoss exploded application.
I assume "Auto reload" and "restart" mean the same thing here ?
The regular expression thing would be what I'm looking for. It would trigger automatic restart on content change. With exploded application content if that is possible.
It would only be for exploded content since everytime a full archive is updated JBoss would redeploy on its own.