One troubling aspect of building Java EE applications is the turn around time for the edit, compile, deploy process. I tried using Jetty but even that has some problems after making several edits you will usually run into a memory error.
At the moment I use Netbeans and I can see edits to the presentation layer without redeployment but when making changes to the model then a full rebuild is necessary and there could be some problems.
What are some recommendations for improving this aspect of the process?
Troubling? Really? How long are your projects?
I think that Spring dm Server might start making in-roads with its OSGi technology. It keeps deployments modular, and you can hot deploy/undeploy individual modules.