Eclipse - Tomcat - Struts

Since there is a long way for me to play around with struts, I have decided to work with a simpler environment (then jboss). If you don't have any EJB architectural issues, tomcat is quite a reasonable playground for struts learning.
Anyways here is what I have done:

settingUpTomcatEclipseStrutsEnv.log:

- Downloaded tomcat5.5.23 here.
- Installed tomcat (just unzip it somewhere :)
- Downloaded Sysdeo Eclipse tomcat plugin here.
Notes on sysdeo: I tried tomcatPluginV32beta3 with Tomcat 6, it can start stop tomcat just fine but had some troubles when I tried to deploy and debug, so I did not argue, just switched to Tomcat 5.5
- Installed Sysdeo (copy it to the plugins directory of Eclipse as usual and restart Eclipse. )
- Told Eclipse where Tomcat is living (see shots below)








- Downloaded Struts 2.0.6 from here
- Unpacked it somewhere, jumped into docs folder, spent a week


thats it. looks quite simple but really putting right versions together takes a lot of time. I will report my training stories as it goes on...

Eclipse with WTP

Eclipse has a webtools plugin (http://www.eclipse.org/webtools) which really fills eclipse with many handy tools.
There is a nice tutorial here guiding setting up a development environment with tomcat.

Building a dev environment with Eclipse and jboss

I am trying to figure out how struts 2 (http://struts.apache.org) can help easing web development. It took my two days (two f days!!) to build an environment to come up with a Hello World :) I got stuck with a stupid mistake I have made and found the solution on a blog post. So I have decided to post my experience here maybe it will help someone else...

Anyways first thing to do was to setup eclipse working with an application server to easy deploy and debug. I am using jboss 4.0.5 and eclipse 3.2.2. First thing comes to mind is sure to have JBoss IDE for Eclipse. (http://labs.jboss.com/portal/jbosside/download/index.html) And here comes the first problem. Last stable version of JBossIDE is not working with Eclipse 3.2 or later. There is a nice arguing going on at jboss forums between ide developers and angry users. You have to use JBoss IDE 2.0.0Beta with Eclipse 3.2 And with Eclipse 3.2 I faced with a bug at packaging so I upgraded Eclipse to 3.2.2

BTW for those who want to make a clean jboss installation, do not download the jbossx.x.x.zip file if you don't want to make configurations manually (which might be quite messy) rather use jems-installer jar. Makes life much easier.

Struts stories later...