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Change in Java coding required restart Tomcat everytimes

Everytimes, I change the java coding in java class under Eclipse. I click the run-as, it requires to restart the embedded Tomcat server in order to make the change effective. How can I test the change without the need to restart the Tomcat server. Because it is very time-consuming, if I need to restart the embedded Tomcat server whenever I change some coding. It will spend one minute for testing a little change.
Thanks

What you need is a hot deploy:
Hot-deployable services are those which can be added to or removed
from the running server. It is the ability to change ON-THE-FLY what’s
currently deployed without redeploying it.
Hot deployment is VERY hot for development. The time savings realized
when your developers can simply run their build and have the new code
auto-deploy instead of build, shutdown, startup is massive.
And good news there is a hot deploy in Eclipse. Just Follow the Eclipse tutorial for this

This process is called hot swap or also hot deploy. There are tools that do this process for you. One open source tool that you can check is HotSwapAgent. One paid alternative would be JRebel.
Obviously goes without saying that these two are far from comparable in terms of features and efficiency. But if it is just for testing purposes the open source alternative is just fine. In industry, not that much(we have tried it in my company and didn't fit our expectations).

If i am not wrong there is a option to do that. I am pretty sure that you have seen that.

Local development setup

I'm currently looking into what better ways there are for deploying/setting up webapps locally after code changes and database changes.
So far I've seen the following tools/ways come by, and attempted each of them:
ANT build target that compiles, makes a jar, a war file and deploys that to the tomcat folder
Gradle build in combination with the tomcat plugin, which already does a bit of a better job than option #1
Good ol' fashioned command line
Setup run configuration within Intellij to do the deployment for you
Write shell script and call this via command line (haven't tried this)
To be honest I'm not finding each of these the ideal solution. I find option #4 the easiest as it allows me to, via a short-cut, easily deploy my changes and continue. This has however not given me an option for database changes yet, probably just me that missed it.
My question is mainly what tools/ways are you guys using in order to achieve an easy and maintainable development environment? What considerations come with those?

Well, let me tell you what I do for local web app setup.
In your favorite IDE(eclipse in my case) i'll configure the application server plugin(tomcat or webpshere) from Eclipse marketplace.
This setup will help to auto publish code changes to the server whenever I make a change in the application. I use Maven build tool for the application packaging. However I'm not sure about the database side.

For the people that were wondering how I ended up doing and found the best to work for me.
I currently have configured my IntelliJ IDE in such a way that the tomcat instance is linked and can be properly controlled and deployed, including debug, from within IntelliJ itself. This allows me to, via an easy shortcut, instantly populate any resources changes (css, javascript, front end) or redeploy or even restart the server. Especially with a small application this works very well.
It is yet to be determined whether this would still work with a multi-module setup and a larger project size.
Should you want more information on how this configuration can be achieved, feel free to send me a direct message.

How to make Netbeans hotdeploys to Glassfish faster?

On changing a single line of code or just adding a comment line, netbeans redeploys the entire project to server, which eats up lot of development/debugging time. I know, I can disable the hot deploys but I don't want that, I just want to make hot deploys work faster so that I could test changes faster on browser.
Moreover in debugging mode it is even worse in terms of time taken for deployment.
Is there something I can do about ? Or should I do hot deploys some other way ?

I dont know any way of doing it in Netbeans itself, but you can always take a look at JRebel.
This tool monitors your class folders and hotdeploys them to the application server when a file has changed. I use this in Eclipse with Tomcat and it works very good for me.

What are the best methods for deploying java code to production?

Currently we have a Java Restlet API with dependencies controlled via Maven. When we update the API we run maven assembly:assembly which does the unit tests etc and produces a single jar file. We then upload this to the production server and run it using nohup.
Is there a better or more automated way of doing this? Is this where something like Hudson would come in?
Thanks

My experience goes with webapp-deployment. But same should hold true here. Use Maven, Cargo, Nexus (or Artifactory), Hudson and probably, Jira in conjunction of product release.
Automated release process are more reliable because there is no human factor involved that may forget a step.
We also use Liquibase for database versioning. And, if you are dealing with database changes in your application deployment. You'll realize Liquibase boosts so much confidence while running alter scripts.
I would suggest to go through the following resources
Automated Deployment with Maven - going the whole nine yards If you can, literally follow this pattern.
Maven 2 Effective Implementation -- this book really helped us a lot.

There are several Maven plugins to help deployment. The most general of them is Cargo, but there are also app server specific plugins for some concrete servers like JBoss.

Most companies I have worked for (actually, all) have had some sort of custom in-house built deployment system; even if build was done using a standard framework (like Maven in use at my current company).
Part of this is because there are many aspects that tie closely to company-specific infrastructure, capacity management and monitoring systems; and so even though there are open-source systems, there is usually something that needs to be tweaked.

It sounds like you are running your app on its own--it isn't part of any application server. If you aren't using an application server, there are probably some ways to get cargo and maven to deploy it for you, but you may be better off just using some shell scripts to deploy and run the application.
However, as your application grows, you may find a need for an application server like Jetty, JBoss, Glassfish, Tomcat, etc. When this happens, take a look at the cargo plugin for Maven because it will allow you to do something like:
mvn cargo:redeploy
That will package up your application, send it to the server and restart the app. If you want Hudson to do this for you automatically you can add it as a target to build.
Cargo can save you a lot of time when you have to frequently update an application server.

Avoid RePublishing the web application after Eclipse Shutdown

I am having my web application deployed on Tomcat5.5 and I use it in integration with eclipse 3.2.Each time I close the eclipse and restart it, I need to republish the application even when it hasn't been modified.
Is there a way to avoid this or any step I am missing ?

Go to Preferences->Server->Launching . Remove option 'Automatically Publish When Starting Server'

I think adij.wordpress.com correctly nailed this one. If you find that you're spending a lot of time waiting for Tomcat to restart as you develop your application, consider using Jetty instead. It'll restart in a fraction of the time Tomcat does and provides a full featured alternative that is ideal for agile development.
We use Glassfish (Tomcat based) with multiple EAR files and it's dog slow for development so each EAR project contains a Jetty launcher that simply fires up for the single WAR the developer is working on at the time. If you use IntelliJ this can be made automatic so that changes at any tier of the application can be instantly reflected into the currently running application in the time it takes to click onto the browser and refresh the page.

Do eclipse 3.3 or 3.4, or later versions of WTP behave the same way for you?

As this is a quite old question and still filed under unanswered, I'd like to broaden the scope with this answer:
I assume there is a reason for you to want to cut out republishing of your application that I don't know (other than the aversion against unnecessary work being done)
The only thing I can guess is that it takes a significant amount of time. For me the publishing time has never been an issue, but if they are for you, you might think about
increasing your memory (if swapping virtual memory slows republishing) - e.g. buying new RAM
optimize dependencies in your project, e.g. prepackage dependent projects if there's a huge number of them or create subprojects and depend upon them if there's only one huge project. (This assumes, that any of these factors slows republishing. I have not measured it)
does using Tomcat6 or glassfish help?
It might be, that not publishing is your issue but startup time. You might gain a lot by controlling that very tightly, e.g. starting services on demand after the webapplication has started. I know several applications that do some heavy work during startup (before they accept their first connection and before they pass control on to the next application startup that might do the same). I hate them. Usually such services get lots of swear words and finally their own web/application server. Having to restart one of these applications should at least not make all the other applications (and their users) suffer that are written with nice startup times in mind.
If your question is still an issue and you are still looking for a solution, please comment. What is your republishing time?