I’m developing on a Ubuntu 8.04 machine using Eclipse Ganymede. I installed Tomcat 5.5 using sudo apt-get install tomcat5.5 tomcat5.5-admin and using an Ant script I deploy my WAR file by copying it to $CATALINA_HOME/webapps.
I then created an Eclipse project and I have it output compiled source in a similar but separate directory structure under $PROJECT_ROOT/target/. I still deploy the WAR file by right clicking on the build.xml and choosing my deploy-war task.
As Tomcat is running as a deamon, automatically started up on booting, I’m not instructing it when to start or exit.
My problems with this setup are:
- Using this approach I do not get any output to the Eclipse console, as Tomcat is running under the
tomcat55user and I have a different login and no access toStdoutoftomcat55. - The logging which occurs is also directed to
Stdoutat the moment, which I find pretty nice during development. But it’s not nice when I can’t see it. 🙂 - I don’t have any servers under the
Servertab and noRun configurations. This makes it impossible for me to use theDebug modeof Eclipse, which otherwise is quite convenient.
What do you think I should do to integrate them and in turn make my development environment much better?
I’d say forget the pre-packaged Tomcat. Grab the apache-tomcat-x.y.z.zip from the site, unzip it somewhere in your $HOME and add a Server to your eclipse workspace, pointing to your local installation of tomcat. Of course you need the j2ee/wtp Eclipse bundle. Works fine on Windows, can’t see a reason for it not working on Linux.
Edit: You may have to fiddle with server ports if you have two tomcat installs.