I usually use JVM hot deployment, which works where your Java methods signature don't change. In other cases, i simply redeploy - fortunately, restart with Jodd is just matter of seconds, and in my environment until I go back to the browser, it is all restarted :) Of course, I do not restart when changing any resource (html, css...). These changes are applied immediately using the IDE.
Alternative is using JRebel, but again, I dont believe it will work out of box for all cases, without plugins.
Can you share your exception? I can try to set it up locally and try to recreate :)