The debugging tip I wrote about Debugging a Deployed Flex Application saved me a lot of time when developing Flex applications that are deployed on J2EE servers. But I still had the issue of a 20 second code change, then a 2-3 minute package and deployment before I could see the changes.

What I discovered was that after the war file containing the Flex application has been deployed on the application server (LiveCycle running on JBoss in my case), it was possible to locate the extracted war from the servers’ deployment directory, and replace your newly built swf file from you bin-debug folder in Flex Builder directly over the top of the previously deployed version. Then simply by clearing the cache in your browser and requesting the URL again, JBoss would grab the new swf and serve that. No more rebuilding the package and deploying for every small change! Saves a LOT of development time.