Eclipse tips and tricks for incremental packaging

I happened across this screencast, which shows how to do incremental packaging in Eclipse with JBoss Tools. It supports both compressed archives and exploded directories. The biggest advantage I see is that you can customize which project files or file types go where in the output package, whether that’s a JAR, WAR, EAR, or something else. JBoss Tools can also keep the project files in sync with the package automatically and add changes incrementally as they happen. That saves you a call to Ant or Maven.

I haven’t tried the plug-in yet. I’ll do that next week. At first glance, though, it offers custom packaging with incremental synchronization, which I’ve wanted for a long time.