I came across the term "exploded development" on this site...
http://www.zeroturnaround.com/javarebel/support-matrix/
and remembered hearing it before in relation to working with Java web applications. From what I can tell it is something to do with deploying your .war file as an extracted/raw set of files. Instead of using an ANT/Maven task to deploy a war file to the application server each time you want to try your code changes you are telling the application server to server the contents of a folder where the contents of the war are deployed "raw".
Am I on the right track? If anybody has a solid understanding of what this term means and the implications of using it that would be great.