How does ‘Servers’ view work underlying in Eclipse?

Question

‘Servers’ is built-in view in Eclipse. We could integrate jee server into Eclipse easily. It could start/stop server both in normal and debug modes. Moreover, we could even set timeout and deployment path, things like that. Various types of server tomcat, jboss, websphere are supported, no intrusive to server.

I am just curious about how these cool things happen behind the scene. The complete mechanism is large and complex, so I just want to know general mechanism about it, an article also could be fine for me. Thank you!

Answer 1

It's the server-specific plugin which does all the work. When integrating a Server in Eclipse you basically need to instruct the plugin where to find the installation root of the server in question. The plugin in turn knows precisely where to locate the default libraries, how to deploy webapps to the server in question and how to start/stop the server with eventually extra commandline arguments.

Since every server make/version needs a different approach (as different as when you need to do it "manually"), I'll only give a Tomcat 6.0 based example how it roughly works. Doubleclick the server entry in Servers view and check the Server Location section. The field Server Path denotes the root location of configuration files. It's by default in Eclipse metadata (when Use workspace metadata is selected). If you browse further in this folder, you'll find something like tmp0\conf\server.xml. It contains information about where the to-be-deployed webapps are located, which context name it should have and so on. The plugin basically gives this information to Tomcat and it will handle it further.

Answer 2

Basically, server adapters are Eclipse plugins and allow to extend the IDE by implementing a set of generic actions (start, debug, stop, deploy, undeploy) that are translated into server specific orders. They also expose server specific configuration parameters. The deployment is more or less intrusive depending on the server (it may be done outside the server folder tree or in a special eclipse folder).