Can eclipse be used to fully replace ant?

Question

I don't want to build the files manually with command line,

is it possible for eclipse to do the equivalent for tomcat automatically?

Answer 1

eclipse by default does compile your project automatically. Do you mean to have eclipse deploying to tomcat automatically?

If that is what you would like to do, Eclipse WebTools has support for deploying to servlet container. One example of how to do that is http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-eclipse-tomcat/index.html

Answer 2

If you have a build.xml file in your project root, you can right click on it in eclipse, select Run As -> Ant Build...

From there you can configure how it should run the script just as if you were using ant.