Eclipse import war problem

[vijay kumarg]

I have imported one war file into eclipse workspace.
But in tomcat manager window I am not able to see that application which is imported.The environment is tomcat 5.5 and eclipse 3.1.2 and jdk 1.5

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Vijay,
Are you using a Tomcat plugin? If so, which one?

[Tim Holloway]

It's hard to know where to start.

First off, I'm not sure what an Eclipse "Tomcat Manager Window" is supposed to be. That may be because Eclipse itself has no inherent J2EE support. I use sysdeo's Tomcat plugin, and there's nothing I'd call a "Tomcat Manager Window" in it. About the closest I could come would be the Tomcat topic that sysdeo adds to the Window/Preferences Dialog.

Eclipse can import source code to build a project, but it doesn't import finished products such as WARs except in the sense that an eclipse project can be set up to reference class directories or jarfiles that were built outside of Eclipse.

[vijay kumarg]

Hello Jeanne and Tim,
In the eclipse installation directory this plugin is avilable
C:\Program Files\eclipse\plugins\com.sysdeo.eclipse.tomcat_3.1.0.

[Tim Holloway]

OK, that should mean that you have the sysdeo plugin. Additional clues are the little cat icons that probably show up on your toolbar and/or a Tomcat menu.

However, I still don't understand what you expected "importing" a WAR to do for you.

[vijay kumarg]

Tim,
My intention behind that is I want to use some demo applications avilable on differenr sites which are packaged as wars.
For this how should I proceed?

Thanks,

[Tim Holloway]

OK, I think I'm beginning to get an idea. The sysdeo plugin is a full-fledged Tomcat manager, so it can handle both Eclipse projects and binary apps. It's actually Tomcat running this stuff, so Eclipse doesn't get involved at all. You can just copy the WAR to the TOMCAT_HOME/webapps directory, or you can setup a web context in the TOMCAT_HOME/conf/Catalina/localhost directory that establishes a URL context and points to the WAR file, wherever you have it stored. This is slightly different in Tomcat4, but Tomcat4 is now about 3 years past end-of-life, so I sincerely hope you're using a Tomcat 5 or later.

Just to run the WARs under that Tomcat server requires nothing more than that. Like I said, Eclipse doesn't care. However, if you have source code for the WARs, you can create Eclipse Java Projects, which you'll usually want to do with one project per WAR. You'd then import the WAR source code into those projects. Finally, you'd use the Tomcat options on the Window/Preferences menu to indicate to sysdeo that the source code is related to the WARs. At that point, you'll be able to set breakpoints on the source files and do all the other debugging techniques same as if you'd built up your own WARs from your own source code.

Hope that makes things a little clearer.
[ February 20, 2007: Message edited by: Tim Holloway ]

[vijay kumarg]

Thanks Tim,
Your broader explanation helped me to look into for more details.

Thanks,
Vijay