Question

I have two tomcat web applications that need to share information using a singleton. I have already made it work by placing the jared classes in the tomcat common directory. Each webapp then gets the same copy of the singleton. What I would like to do is to integrate this behavior within eclipse. I would like the common classes to be a single project that gets incorporated into the tomcat common class loader every time I start the tomcat server within eclipse. Anyone knows how to configure eclipse to do this?

Answer 1

I’ve managed to get it working. Here is what I did:

• Created a common project in the eclipse workspace.
• Created the two web applications, called first and second, that should share the common project.

When the web applications are created a Servers project is created with the tomcat configuration.

• Change catalina.properties inside the Servers project and add the line shared.loader=/path-to-workspace/common/bin.

This works perfectly for development. Every time a new build is created everything is in sync. For deployment You need to convert the common project into a common.jar and place it in ${catalina.home}/lib.