I'm not familiar with the English adjective "fiddly"--perhaps it comes from the same place that "outjection" comes from. 8-) Anyway, thanks for the quick response: what you describe is exactly what I'm doing with Tomcat. I've got IDEA set up to create an exploded directory that I access via Tomcat. But it doesn't work. I'd really like to stick with Tomcat instead of switching to JBoss. Is there any obvious reason why hot deploy should work with JBoss but not with Tomcat? Does it have something to do with embedded EJB? Thanks, david geary View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=3958900#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...