Tutorials : The Power of Three - Eclipse, Tomcat, and Struts :

The Tomcat Project Type

If you start to create a new Java project, you'll see the new Tomcat project as an option:

A Tomcat project is a Java project with the J2EE directory structure used in a war-file.

We'll create such a project and call it Tom1:

If you press the "Next" button you'll see this box:

The selection "Can update server.xml file" is important. Tomcat uses this file from the conf directory for various purposes. One of them is to locate projects that are not placed in Tomcat's webapps folder. By checking "Can update server.xml file" you allow the plug-in to add the Eclipse projects to the server.xml file. When we finish creating the Tom1 project we can therefore find this line in server.xml:

<Context path="/Tom1" 
         reloadable="true" 
         docBase="C:\eclipse3.04\workspace\Tom1" 
         workDir="C:\eclipse3.04\workspace\Tom1\work" />

The path attribute is the name you use in the URL to address the application. The reloadable attribute chooses dynamic reloading of the application, and we'll discuss this option further below. DocBase tells Tomcat where to find the application, and workDir is a location for servlets to use.

The Tom1 project looks like this in Eclipse:

If you look in the Eclipse installation directory you'll see a matching directory structure:

Files in the Tom1 project should be placed in these folders:

When Eclipse compiles a Java class it knows that it should be put in the classes directory. This is actually a "property" of the project. Right-click on the Tom1 project and select Properties/Java Build Path/Source:

It's very important that the source folder and the output folder are set correctly for a project. The source folder does not need to be the WEB-INF/src folder, but the output folder must be WEB-INF/classes since this is the J2EE standard. The reason for the work folder also being set as a source folder is that Tomcat places the servlet code generated from jsp-pages here.

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