US Patent 7296255 Systems for incremental application deployment

Incremental application deployment allows any files under development for an application to be modified directly in place, such as on a server disk. Application and module configuration information can be collected from a user as they build their application. Each time a developer modifies the configuration of the application, changes can be immediately deployed to the server in the background, including appropriate modifications to the deployment descriptors. Once modifications are completed, the application can have already been deployed to the server.