At last. Today I got to ignore Domino Designer, and fire up Eclipse again. Hurrah! It’s so nice to get out of Designer and do something more interesting than tweak my “CommonFields” sub-form (those who do a lot of web development in Domino will know what I mean ;-)).

Anyway, back to that there Java stuff. Today I started on a new mini-project — nothing fancy, just something ideal for getting back into the language — and it was good fun. My current laptop at work, Son of Stinky, had Eclipse on it, but precious little else. I needed to do some servlet work, so first up I grabbed Tomcat and then, of course, that most indispensable of plug-ins: Sysdeo’s Tomcat plug-in. This free piece of kit does a few things, and does them well. Briefly then:

• It starts Tomcat from within Eclipse
• It stops it again (or simply performs a re-start)
• It adds a new “Tomcat Project” option when using the new project wizard
• Simple linking to Tomcat for remote debugging
• It edits the server.xml and Tomcat user files on the fly
• It exports projects as WAR files

So, a WSAD killer it is not, but extremely handy nonetheless: relieving some of the tedium of coding servlets, JSPs and the like, without taking over.

With regards Tomcat itself, I loaded up a slightly older version: 4.1.31 rather than the newer 5.x code-stream. This is simply because I want to code at least roughly along the same lines as the production environment used, which is WebSphere 5.1 (and therefore uses the Servlet 2.3 implementation, rather than v.2.4 as in Tomcat 5.x).

Anyway, all this is to simply convey that firing up such an environment, after months of hard slog in Domino Designer, was a breath of fresh air. I’m sure the novelty will fade…

Related reading
» Complete newbie to the Sysdeo plug-in? Check out this starter for ten
» Eclipse plug-ins page on vowe’s wiki
» Eclipse plug-ins page on my wiki

Filed underjava, tomcat, plugins