This is a complete solution about how to set up a practical development environment with maven, eclipse and tomcat.
Before start you need to take some time to check if your system environment meet below system environmental requirements for windows if you use window.
Environmental requirements (Windows):
- JDK
- Ant (if you don't want to use ant command to run or build project not required)
- Maven
- gwt sdk
- eclipse with plugins, m2e, maven integration forWTP, google plugin and sysdeo tomcat launcher.
- Tomcat
- Add directories of ant, maven and gwt sdk into path environment variable.
1. Create a gwt maven project
1.1 Approaches
There are two effective approaches to create a gwt maven project, by
gwt maven plugin and
gwt command line. I tried both approaches and chose the latter. Because the pom file generated by the latter is quite reasonable than the former. You don't need to make any change on pom.xml you can import it into eclipse directly without any error.
We need use gwt command line command webAppCreator. Before run this command you need to make sure you have added gwt sdk into your environment variable PATH.
1.2 webAppCreator
Use
webAppCreater -help, you can get all the paramters which you can use.
WebAppCreator [-overwrite] [-ignore] [-templates template1,template2,...] [-out dir] [-junit pathToJUnitJar] [-maven] [-noant] moduleName
where
-overwrite Overwrite any existing files
-ignore Ignore any existing files; do not overwrite
-templates Specifies the template(s) to use (comma separeted). Defaults to 'sample,ant,eclipse,readme'
-out The directory to write output files into (defaults to current)
-junit Specifies the path to your junit.jar (optional)
-maven Deprecated. Create a maven2 project structure and pom file (default disabled). Equivalent to specifying 'maven' in the list of templates.
-noant Deprecated. Do not create an ant configuration file. Equivalent to not specifying 'ant' in the list of templates.
and
moduleName The name of the module to create (e.g. com.example.myapp.MyApp)
-maven parameter is the key for generating gwt maven project.
1.3 Execute command
Run
webAppCreator -maven com.martian.gwtmavenproject.MainPanel
com.gwtmavenproject.MainPanel is module name of this gwt project.
After execution you can get a standard maven project. There are only src folder, pom file and readme.txt under project root folder.
You may want to change the artifactId and groupId of this project.
2. Import into eclipse as maven project
Without any problem. Nothing can be accountable.
3. Use your own Tomcat in development mode instead of Jetty
3.1 Deploy project to your own Tomcat
Three methods, the latter two also can be applied to other types of application servers:
- Use sysdeo Tomcat launcher plugin.
- Use server tool of WTP. Just like a ordinary java web application, but don't forget to add the generated web sources to Deployment Assembly of the project if you want to run at product mode.
In fact, in this way you can use other sorts of web application server, such as some J2EE container.
- Use an external Tomcat Server directly. If in this way you want to debug the server side code you have to use remote debug.
The same principle of the two methods. The former may be more convenient when multiple applications share one tomcat server and you can start or stop in eclipse.
Now assume that you have successfully deployed gwt project to your Tomcat server.
3.2 Launch project in development mode
The principle will be used latter references
Compile & Debug of gwt application.
a. Right click project in project explorer --> Debug As --> Web Application (running on an external server)
b. Specify external server URL and launch development mode
You can access your application with http://localhost:8080/gwtmavenproject/. So
Click ok to development mode.
c. Start your Tomcat
If you use sysdeo up Tomcat
you have to change the output console manually in eclipse for seeing them.
d. Enjoy your development time!
It is powerful in that we can debug client-side code.
e. Edit debug configuration
If you still have something to change you can access
Find the configuration just created.
You can change some start arguments like -logLevel, change it from INFO to DEBUG.
