Deploying & Running Enterprise Applications > Getting Started

MyEclipse Tomcat Server

Tutorial
Table of Contents

1. Introduction
  2. Suggested Audience
3. System Requirements
4. Getting Started
5. Creating a Web Project
6. Deploying a Web Project
7. Running the Web Project
8. Debugging the Web Project
9. Conclusion
10. Resources
11. Feedback

1. Introduction
Welcome to the MyEclipse Tomcat 6 Server Tutorial. Within MyEclipse an
embedded Tomcat 6 server is included 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 you'll be able to immediately deploy your web project, run and
debug it with no additional configuration.

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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.
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3. System Requirements
This tutorial was written using MyEclipse.

NOTE: Within MyEclipse JAX-WS reference implementation libraries are 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 and current 6 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.

This tutorial was writtin using MyEclipse. However, if you 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.

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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. 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

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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

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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.

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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
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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
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9. Conclusion
Hopefully from this simple guide you can begin to get an idea of how fast you
can get up and running with the embedded Tomcat server that now ships with
MyEclipse 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.

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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.

 Sample Web Project (Used in this Guide)

 Application Server Tutorial
  Working with Web Projects Tutorial

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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.

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