Setup Eclipse and Tomcat to play nice together
Eclipse is by far my favorite IDE, which makes Rational Application Developer bearable. The one thing I've been spoiled on in RAD is being able to run the WebSphere Test Environment inside the development environment and be able to have some level of hot deploy when modifying classes or jsp's in the web project. This brings me to my problem with Eclipse and Tomcat, Eclipse provides great support for adding a Tomcat server to run in your IDE, but the default classpath set up forces you to do a build and restart almost everytime you modify a JSP or Class, this is a real pain. The other pain is that by default when you set up a web project, eclipse decides to build your src files into a build directory rather than just building them directly into the web project's WEB-INF/classes directory.
This is what I'm here to solve. I'm assuming your using Eclipse 3.2 (Callisto) with the Web Tools installed, JDK 1.5 or 1.6, and Tomcat 5.5 or 6. May work in earlier versions, but I haven't set up any projects like that recently.