Glad to be here! I've been lurking since I came here for pointers on the Java Developer cert I took last year.
I didn't mean to hijack. I guess I assumed that one suitable reply to the original poster would be a tool that makes replacing a jsp or other file easier.
As a support developer, I have access to Ant, etc., but a build on our software isn't always instant, because the svn repository is overseas. There is no doubt that at some point, the source needs to be updated and a new war file generated, at least if the change is one that is supposed to become permanent, so, point(s) taken.
Maybe its a working style thing. I often find that we need to make changes on the fly to configuration files and such in the war file for specific customer configurations that we are either
testing, or shipping out as fixes.
For the support folks in the field, either I have to tweak the war file for them for a specific customer situation, or educate them about unpacking, changing and repacking. These changes are always one-off, and will never go into a source tree. Asking the field folks to set up a development environment isn't really an option. However, they may find they need to make the change several times for other customers with similar issues.
Since Winzip is such a defacto tool for war file manipulation, I'm surprised they've never added such a feature. I'd be even more surprised if no one else has developed somethign to do this, though.
Please, I KNOW that changing config files in the war file is NOT a user-friendly way of doing things. When central development gives us lemons... :-)
-V