Should the feature work?
I do not know, since I am not familiar with IntelliJ. The folks at IntelliJ may not have gotten around to implementing that aspect of their plugin, yet. You may want to ask this question on the IntelliJ support site. I know that NetBeans does directory deployment of Web Application projects and has for a while. This is pretty stable and quite useful.
I recently added code to NetBeans to enable directory deployment of EJB Module and Enterprise Application projects. This hasn't been really heavily tested (since it depend on bug fixes that just recently went into the GF builds).
The asadmin command supports deploydir, too.
vbk
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