Eclipse Tomcat and lots of pain

Question

Hi All,
while working on JSP i thought it will be nice to have an IDE so i installed eclipse with tomcat already running on system.
now as a new user i discovered eclipse uses its own server instance rather than using the server which is already running (and there are pros and cons this too)
however due to some requirements i need to use the server installation for development... i changed the server path from .metadata to localhost..(should it work fine now?)
no its not... may be i need to set eclipse with some more steps to use my current installation of tomcat... what all they are honestly i don't know... plz help
as the wiki page is quite confusing when each like results in ''may or may not" statement....:(
to my horror ...i am able to run jsp pages ???!!!! the tomcat main service in control panel is stopped... eclipse server will not start showing the port already in use error(is there a way to fix it without changing the port?)
-Please help with : How to setup eclipse to use the orignal server installation?
Thanks!!

Answer 1

Rishikesh.Chaki wrote:
Sometimes when i try to start the server from eclipse it will not start saying port 8080 is already in use (i don’t want to change it for eclipse as localhost is using 8080 only)... The server is not going to lie; if it says this then there really is something still listening on the socket, which means a previous instance of the server might not have stopped properly for example.
last eve i created a war file and deployed it on my tomcat sever it was working fine. Then again the same issue sometimes the JSP page will crash showing HTTP-500 error (with no changes made).
Hard to say what might be wrong without the exception stacktrace that should come with the error 500 - check the server logs when it happens.
While diagnosing the problem i stopped my eclipse server; stopped the control panel tomcat service as well; but i am still able to run the JSP programs and its also showing tomcat home page...Yeah well thats the biggest issue then; tomcat is failing to stop when triggered from Eclipse.
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I used a port listening utility and its showing javaw.exe is using 8080 port (could this be a reason for this strange behaviour?)Of course!
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Should i again to ahead and reinstall eclipse from scratch?
It might help, but it sounds more like an issue with the Eclipse plugin that controls the server connection. Which version of Eclipse are you using?
Are you stuck with Eclipse by the way? You could also give Netbeans 6.8 a try; I have had absolutely no problems with it in combination with Tomcat 6, although with Netbeans it is easiest to use the bundled Tomcat that comes with it in stead of configuring an instance yourself.