Now that Soashable is ported to Maven, I want time savers because the change/compile/package/deploy/test cycle is way too slow. I did a bit of research and here's what I've found.

Some goals that are useful alone or combined:

war:inplace - copies all dependencies into the webapp source, including overlays, classes (made with 'compile'), dependencies. See caveat below.
javascript:inplace - copies javascript dependencies, the same way war:inplace works
jetty:run - runs the inplace webapp; scanIntervalSeconds of 1 makes rapid 'testing' possible

Using jetty:run in its own terminal requires no recompilation or packaging in order to see changes reflected in the running webapp, since it runs out of the source directory. A javascript:inplace or war:inplace in another terminal will copy any updated dependencies into place and work while the application is running.

This method cuts several seconds off of the change/test cycle, from around 10 in any case to 5 or less for dependency changes, and immediate for local changes.

The caveat is that it copies dependencies into src/main/webapp, which might confuse some junior developers or perhaps make svn:ignore invaluable. A slightly slower alternative is to use war:exploded and jetty:run-exploded.

Perhaps the best solution would be a hybrid resource resolver that first checks src/main/webapp and then falls back to the war:exploded target.