I’m the first to admit that if you are looking for breaking news, I am not the source. Broken news, maybe…

Anyway, I just noticed the FastSwap feature for WLS 10.3. This allows for updating classes in a running instance without having to do a full redeploy. If you have spent anytime developing WebLogic Portal applications, you know what a boon this is.  Two of the major productivity killers in building  WLP solutions is the time it takes to redeploy the whole portal to test every little change, and eventual Out of Memory errors that will occur with repeated redeployment of the same application.

Turning on the feature is a simple matter of updating weblogic.xml and weblogic-application.xml (see the documentation for the specifics).

One note of caution: This is for development use only. If your deployment processes do not include either deployment plans or environment-specific deployment descriptors, you will need to maintain a local copy outside of your normal source control.

© Scott S. Nelson