I downloaded spring-loaded.jar and tried to set it up for IntelliJ but unfortunately it did not work.
So, here is my questions:
1) What needs to be done exactly to set it up? 2) How do I trigger hot-swap?
I think you're looking for the spring-loaded project.
As stated in the official documentation, you have to add this java agent argument in your IntelliJ "run configuration" (the configuration that runs your application - it may be a Java class or a servlet container like Tomcat):
-javaagent:<pathTo>/springloaded-{VERSION}.jar
Once this agent is loaded, it watches *.class
files on disk and reloads them if modified (by your IDE, for example).
Warning: depending on your application, and especially if it contains caches, data intialized at startup... you may have to write specific plugins or event listeners to reinitialize those.