jsp preview plugin

[vasug]

Hi,

I was not able to preview the jsp that i have written. Is there any plugin for that. I am using eclipse 3.5.1(galileo).

Thanks in Advance
Vasu

[travishein]

The closest thing I have found is to kind of have a tomcat (or jetty) application server instace launched from within Eclipse. Like a managed server instance. This comes with something in the J2EE flavor of eclipse. I never really got it to work well for non trivial web applications though. And it seemed slower to get up and going.

If it is lay out changes to the JSP you want to test, I used to build my project in Eclipse such that the folder structure was that of how it would look in a deployed web application folder, like having a top level WEB-INF folder, my sources were then in WEB-INF/src. Eclipse compiled java classes into WEB-INF/classes.

The motivation being, I would check out the module [from subversion] into my local dev tomcat service webapps folder, and import the module into my workspace by choosing to not copy the files into the workspace folder, that is run it in eclipse directly from the tomcat instance.

This allowed me to use eclipse, or any text editor for that matter, to directly edit files in the live instance. there was no deploy step, and because the folder was the one backed by the version control system, i just had to check it back in when complete.

But I met a lot of resistnace from other co workers, not used to thinking like a webapp folder structure. And also, it was very annoying when I started using the Eclipse WTP plugin, because they seem to think the project should have a "WebContent" folder, and the classic top level sources, classes folders.

Just an idea though.