Setting Up Ant/Tomcat Development Enivornment

[Aryeh Golob]

I had a general question about setting up my Tomcat development environment.

I believe to have Tomcat set up correctly and verified that I can run a Servlet.

Here are my CATALINA variables ...

    
CATALINA_HOME=/cygdrive/c/app/merchanttraders/tomcat/apache-tomcat-6.0.24
CATALINA_BASE=/cygdrive/c/app/merchanttraders/webapp/ncs_admin

I modified the sample HelloWorldExample servlet and verified that I can compile and run the servlet using the folowing URL.

http://localhost:8080/netcomm/servlets/servlet/HelloWorldExample

Here are the servlet definitions as defined in my web.xml file ...

    
    </servlet>
    <servlet>
        <servlet-name>HelloWorldExample</servlet-name>
        <servlet-class>com.netcommcart.etc.HelloWorldExample</servlet-class>
    </servlet>

  
    <servlet-mapping>
        <servlet-name>HelloWorldExample</servlet-name>
        <url-pattern>/servlets/servlet/HelloWorldExample</url-pattern>
    </servlet-mapping>
  

I have ANT set up so that when I execute the ant command, a build directory is created under the root netcomm directory which contains the $ROOT/netcomm/builds/WEB-INF/classes/com/ .... /HelloWorldExample.class file.

If I move the build WEB-INF application directory structure to the root application directory ($ROOT/netcomm/WEB-INF/classes/com/ .... /HelloWorldExample.class etc.), then everything works fine.


My question, is however, what is the best way to set up my development environment so that I can just type ant and have everything work without having to move directory etc. or restart tomcat server?

The documentation says something about either resetting CATALINA_BASE or using the Manager application ...

Can anyone advise regarding the correct way to set up a Tomcat development environment using ANT in the most efficient way possible?

I appreciate your time and consideration.

Sincerely,
Aryeh