title: Is real time change feedback with Spring/Tomcat/Intellij possible?
body: <p>I have a few weeks before the next project &amp; i'm looking/wanting to streamline our development process to give the UX &amp; Devs guys the shortest lead time to change validation (e.g. 10 seconds for a Java change/1 second for UX/JS changes). </p>
  
  <p>Basically, I want what John Lindquist shows in this <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wCVwdvufTds" rel="nofollow noreferrer">video</a> (RT feedback with webstorm &amp; the Angular todo list example  in 3 minutes) but I with Tomcat &amp; Spring.</p>
  
  <p>Ive been researching/playing this for the last few days with our stack (Tomcat8,Intellij13, Spring4, Angular) and I am just not 'getting it' so think it is my lack of knowledge in this area and i'm missing something (hence the SO question).</p>
  
  <p><strong>What I have achieved to date for UX Guys</strong></p>
  
  <p><a href="http://gruntjs.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Grunt</a> (using node) to serve up the 'static resources'(JS/SCSS/Templates) and livereload to refresh chrome - this is very good and very close to what i want (RT feeback from SCSS/JS/HTML changes) but the big problem is that node is serving the static resources and not TC so with Cross Origin Policies (solved via <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21581258/grunt-connect-task-and-middleware-access-control-allow-origin">this</a> and <a href="https://spring.io/guides/gs/rest-service-cors/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> )- rebuilds in intellij become messy with grunt involved - looked at SCSS compiles with <a href="http://www.jetbrains.com/webstorm/webhelp/file-watchers.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">file watchers</a> but it is not gelling) - in short i did not get grunt servicing static &amp; TC the REST API working in harmony. Another option was <a href="http://jacky.seezone.net/2013/07/25/7362/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this guy</a> updates the TC resources with grunt when the file changes but just don't want to go there. </p>
  
  <p>This leads me back to file watchers, jetbrains live edit (what the web storm video shows) and intellij and again, i'm close when it comes to static content as intellij can update the resources on TC on frame deactivation but (and a big BUT) this is NOT real time and when you change resource structure, you need to refresh the page however we are working on a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-page_application" rel="nofollow noreferrer">SPA</a> which loses context on refresh which slows the guys down as have to reply sequences to get back to where the change happened and also when using intellij they have to 'frame de-activate' to get the changes pushed to TC (they are on dual monitors so to tab off intellij is the same as pushing a button to deploy the changes )</p>
  
  <p>The best to date is grunt and accept the same origin issues for development but am I missing something for the UX guys? </p>
  
  <p><strong>What I have achieved to date for Dev Guys</strong></p>
  
  <p>Before we start, can't afford jrebel and haven't got <a href="https://github.com/spring-projects/spring-loaded" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Spring Loaded</a> working with intellij and tomcat (yet). </p>
  
  <p>at this stage simply having TC refreshed by intellij with classes change and restart when bean definitions/method structure changes. Bad I know but 'it is what we are use to'</p>
  
  <p>Looking at spring boot - promising but ideally would like not to give the configuration freedom away but it does give live updates on the server I believe. </p>
  
  <p>Grails is out at the moment so can't benefit there.</p>
  
  <p>I know Play allows some real time updates but again, haven't looked at this in detail and a big shift from the current stack.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Summary</strong></p>
  
  <p>On the development side will likely stick to Live Edit and accept the refresh/deactivation issue so we can't 'achieve' what John Lindquist shows in Webstorm, i.e. real time updates when resources changes when using Tomcat/Intellij/Chrome - or at least 'I don't know' how to achieve this?</p>
  
  <p>Server side - i'm still working on this, going to continue to look at spring loaded and intellij integration then look at jrebel and see what budget, if any, we can get but in the meantime is there any alternatives as I see the node/ruby/grails guys getting it all so i believe it must be me and i'm missing the best setup to get super fast feedback from our code changes when using Tomcat &amp; Spring?</p>