Geoffrey Duck over at IBM developerWorks gives a quick introductory tutorial on integrating Eclipse and Tomcat. Duck believes that using an Eclipse Tomcat plug-in can help better organize and integrate your Java and Web development projects.

Geoffrey draws from his experiences of developing with Eclipse since its early days. Java programming and debugging was initially a tedious task, but thanks to Eclipse, building quick Java-based prototypes was easy, he says. “My next thought was why not integrate my JSP development into my Eclipse environment as well? Then I would be able to work more easily with my Java code and JSPs. The goal of this article is to save JSP developers time setting up Eclipse to work with Tomcat.”

This article gives a step-by-step guide on downloading and installing Eclipse and Jakarta Tomcat components, configuring them and building an Eclipse Tomcat launcher plug-in that will integrate them. Geoffrey is aided by screenshots and carefully explained code.