http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs81/programming/environment.html Colleagues of mine using weblogic workshop (BEA's distribution of Eclipse integrated with weblogic) assure me that using the split deployment feature they are reaching very very fast development times due to the short time it takes to reload changes in an application under development. In our company, we failed to propose Idea as standard IDE for this same reason (so struggling to keep our 10 licenses, which could become 25 if IDEA supported a better integration with weblogic).