I finally have my application in IntelliJ and deploying to JBoss. I\'d like to get hot deploy working but it looks like I need to understand how IntelliJ and JBoss interact.
I know this is an old and apparently answered question, but unfortunately the links provided in the accepted answer didn't give me the simple details I was looking for. For anyone also trying to understand how IntelliJ IDEA deploys your exploded war to JBoss without copying files to the deployments folder, here's what I've found while deploying locally from IDEA 14 (EAP) to JBoss 7.1.1.Final:
org.jboss.as.server.deployment.DeploymentUnitProcessingException: Failed to mount deployment content, Failed to process phase STRUCTURE of deployment and java.io.FileNotFoundException to name a few.Please refer to the documentation.
Basically, you need an exploded Artifact configuration with the directory name ending with .ear.
Build | Make performs hot deployment as well as Update action (which is configurable and can update only resources, resources and classes, optionally redeploy or restart the server).
Instead of copying your application to JBoss, IDEA runs it with appropriate parameters so that it uses Artifact directory instead. Configuration is very flexible and you can just change the artifact directory location to reside under JBoss directory.