MyEclipse Tomcat Server Tutorial

Introduction
Suggested Audience
System Requirements
Getting Started
Creating a Web Project
Deploying a Web Project
Running the Web Project
Debugging the Web Project
Conclusion
Resources
Feedback

1. Introduction

Welcome to the MyEclipse Tomcat 6 Server Tutorial. In MyEclipse 6.0 an embedded Tomcat 6 server was added to help developers get up and running immediately with their development work and not need to scour the net for an application server to install, download it, install it and configure it. Instead with MyEclipse 6.0 you'll be able to immediately deploy your web project, run and debug it with no additional configuration.

2. Suggested Audience

This tutorial is intended for developers who are somewhat familiar with MyEclipse's Application Server feature set and Java application servers like Tomcat.

To learn more about the topics presented in this tutorial, please have a look at the links in our Resources section. To get a better feel for MyEclipse and learning more about it, please check out our product Documentation for more material.

3. System Requirements

This tutorial was written using MyEclipse 6.0 GA (All in One installer).

NOTE: In MyEclipse 6.5 and beyond the JAX-WS reference implementation (Metro 1.1) libraries were added to the embedded MyEclipse Tomcat server to make development and testing of JAX-WS much easier. Deploying to an external Tomcat server or any other non-JavaEE 5 compliant server can require additional adjustments to the build path of any JAX-WS project, please see the JAX-WS Tutorial for more information covering this.

MyEclipse Tomcat will work with all Java 5 JDKs, however, if you wish to use a Java 6 JDK to run MyEclipse Tomcat, please use JDK 6 update 4 (1.6.0_04) or above to avoid JAX-WS API compatibility issues.

If you are using a newer version of MyEclipse and notice portions of this tutorial looking different than the screens you are seeing, please let us know and we will make sure to resolve any inconsistencies.

4. Getting Started

To get introduced to the new embedded Tomcat server, let's first look at the server view:

Figure 1. Server View

where we see the new Tomcat server listed along side the embedded Derby DB server that was added in MyEclipse 5.5. From this view we can start, stop, restart and manage the server's deployment.

Another popular place for managing the server status is from the toolbar application server buttons:

Figure 2. Toolbar Application Server Controls

These sets of controls are simpler, but perform many of the same tasks. It's up to you to decide which set of controls you'd rather use.

In addition to the new server controls, you can also access the embedded Tomcat 6 preferences from the Application Server Connector preference pages similar to standard application server connector configurations.

The embedded Tomcat configuration is referred to as the "MyEclipse Tomcat 6" connector as shown:

Figure 3. Embedded Tomcat 6 Preferences

5. Creating a Web Project

Now that we know how to control the new Tomcat server, let's take it for a test drive. First thing we need to do is create a new Web Project to work with. Go ahead and create a new simple Java EE 5.0 Web Project:

Figure 4. New Web Project

Figure 5. Configure the New Project

Our new project will look like this now:

Figure 6. Simple Web Project Contents

and if we open the example index.jsp page that was created for us, we see a simple example JSP:

Figure 7. Default JSP Page

6. Deploying a Web Project

Now that we have a Web Project to work with, we can deploy it to Tomcat 6 and begin developing it in real-time. To add a deployment of our project to Tomcat, we want to select Tomcat from the Server View and click the Manage Deployments button:

Figure 8. Manage Deployments

When the new deployment dialog pops up, click Add:

Figure 9. Creating a new deployment

Then filling in the deployment details (all the defaults are fine):

Figure 10. Creating a new deployment

And last you can verify that the deployment was successfully created under Tomcat:

Figure 11. Deployment was successful

Now that the deployment of the project to Tomcat is successful, all there is left to do is run Tomcat and view the page from inside the IDE.

7. Running the Web Project

The first thing we want to do to run this project is to first start up the embedded Tomcat server. We do that by selecting it in the Server View again and clicking the Debug Server button. MyEclipse will switch to the Console View and you want to wait until you can see that Tomcat had started:

Figure 12. Tomcat Started Up

Switching back to the Server View shows the server's status as well as it's deployments:

Figure 13. Server Running State

Now you want to click the Web Browser button up in the toolbar and navigate to http://localhost:8080/SimpleWebProject to see if your JSP page loads correctly. If it does, you should see the simple sample JSP page:

Figure 14. Simple JSP Page Running

To see some real-time editing in action, you can switch back to the JSP editor tab and add some new text to the JSP page then save it:

Figure 15. Modify the Simple JSP Page

Now flip back to the Web Browser and hit the Refresh button, you should see your changes immediately:

Figure 16. Refreshing the Browser Shows Changes

8. Debugging the Web Project

Now that we have our project deployed and are able to change it and refresh to see our changes, let's look at taking that control 1 step farther and debug our application.

Debugging our application isn't just handy to stop at break points and inspect values; we can also change variable values on the fly during the debug session and see them realized immediately in the application as it's running.

Let's take look at an example page with a scriptlet as follows:

Figure 17. JSP Page with a Scriplet

You can see that our Design and Source views are synchronized. Also notice that we declare our secretCode variable with the value h4x0r. Then we set a breakpoint on the line where the scriplet prints out the variables value. Let's go back to our Web Browser and refresh this page to hit the breakpoint:

Figure 18. Hitting a JSP Breakpoint

We can see quite a bit of information above. Namely that our Tomcat thread has been suspended, our breakpoint has been hit and displayed in the bottom portion of the screen where we are stopped. Then at the top right hand side of the screen we see the variables defined in our JSP page. We also see that our secretCode variable has the right value.

Now let's say we wanted to change that value on the fly. We can simply right-click on it, and adjust it's value right here:

Figure 19. Right-click to Change the Variable

Then type in a new value for the variable:

Figure 20. Enter the New Variable Value

After the new value is changed, you can see the updated value in the variables view:

Figure 21. Update Value

So now in order to see our changed value print out in our webpage, we need to hit Continue:

Figure 22. Click Continue

And flip back to the Web Browser to see if the value printed out for secretCode to the website was updated to what we typed in:

Figure 23. Updated Value Printed

9. Conclusion

Hopefully from this simple guide you can begin to get an idea of how fast you can get up and running with th emebedded Tomcat server that now ships with MyEclipse 6.0 and later when working on your own projects.

We also hope that you've seen some of the power of working with MyEclipse during the development cycle and how that can increase your development efficiency.

10. Resources

In this section we want to provide you with additional links to resources that supplement the topics covered in this tutorial. While this is not an exhaustive list, we do make an effort to point to the more popular links that should provide you with diverse, high-quality information.

11. Feedback

We would like to hear from you! If you liked this tutorial, has some suggestions or even some corrections for us please let us know. We track all user feedback about our learning material in our Documentation Forum. Please be sure to let us know which piece of MyEclipse material you are commenting on so we can quickly pinpoint any issues that arise.