By default it seems Gradle will build all dependant subproject JAR files in a multi project build and place them in the classpath when running or testing the application.
I was wondering whether there was a way to instead place the classes directories themselves onto the classpath instead of the JAR files as this would allow monitoring of changes to the classes to be implemented?
There’s nothing built in for this unfortunately. Some people have solved this in an adhoc way by effectively doing a search/replace on the effective classpath where they need this.
This is something that is deeply built in to our new “software model”. That is, the idea that different physical manifestations of the same logical thing are substitutable and preferable in different contexts. Unfortunately, that doesn’t help you today.
That is a shame, it would be a much cleaner solution, we are investigating maybe monitoring changes to the JAR files, but it complicates our reloading system significantly.
Yep, no better answer for you unfortunately.