so the war is just built trivially by the IDE when you use a webapp type project. no messing around with the classpath as the war contains all dependent jars.

so the war is just built trivially by the IDE when you use a webapp type project. no messing around with the classpath as the war contains all dependent jars. if you want clean builds you set up something like jenkins (with the automatically generated exported build files). 1) and 3) I was referring to development, you can just code away and hit F5 to see your results the same way in Java you can with PHP. wrt database jars/binaries: a modern IDE does this all for you too, and is all output into the target war.