Patent ID: 7533379

Claim:
A method for incrementally deploying an enterprise application component on a server, comprising: modifying the enterprise application component, wherein a software developer modifies the enterprise application component using an integrated development environment; automatically modifying a deployment descriptor that describes configuration information for the enterprise application component, wherein the integrated development environment concurrently modifies the deployment descriptor based on the modifications made to the enterprise application component by the software developer; and immediately deploying the modified enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor onto the server; wherein one or more enterprise application components are part of an enterprise application that must be configured to allocate appropriate server resources and specify security requirements; wherein the deployed enterprise application component and the deployed deployment descriptor being modified can be modified directly in place on the server's disk; wherein if the server is not running when the software developer modifies the enterprise application component, a synchronization process is initiated when the server starts to deploy the modified enterprise application component and the modified deployment descriptor to the server; wherein the synchronization process does not remove or modify other application specific configuration settings associated with the enterprise application; and wherein the other application specific configuration settings were added manually by the software developer while the server was not running.