Have you ever come across a situation where your development environment WebSphere is on Linus/Unix and you don’t have access to the filesystem to hot deploy your class changes for testing? Well it’s pretty common if you are working for a big company which has lot of security policies in place. But what do you do? Do you go through all the pain of building the EAR and deploying it to WebSphere only to realize that there was a small piece of code that you missed and that you have to build and deploy all over again! Isn’t that really frustrating!
What I am going to tell you is not as quick a fix as doing a hot deployment, but it does save some deployment time. With this, you won’t need to build the EAR all over again, just have to do the deployment which takes half the time of a full EAR deployment.
This functionality in WebSphere lets you deploy delta changed to an application. All you have to do is 1 – select the application you want to deploy the changes to, 2 – select the path where the file has to be placed inside the application and 3 – select the file on the local filesystem which has to be uploaded and WebSphere will deploy that file for you.
Lets take an example – I want to deploy a class – abc.class in businessobjects.jar at the this path – com\pk\cron. Under the enterprise applications section in WebSphere, there is an option called Update which will let you upload/update this file in the businessobjects.jar. With this you can upload new files or update existing files.
Follow along with the screenshots, it pretty much self explanatory. Only thing you have to be careful about is the path inside the application EAR, that should be correct or WebSphere will place the file in wrong path. If you are not sure about the path, open the EAR, navigate through to the folder where you want to deploy the file and copy that path.
In this case the path is – businessobject.jar\com\pk\cron\abc.class
businessobjects.jar BEFORE uploading the file –
businessobjects.jar AFTER uploading the file – 
Until next time!