Portable JDK, Tomcat, and Eclipse (Windows)

Question

Does anybody know how to make a usb thumb drive with a JDK, Tomcat, and Eclipse (J2EE) (all for a Windows platform, preferably)?

I saw this question, but the only answer was speculative.

I know that the eclipse part would be easy -- just put it on the thumb drive. Tomcat requires a JDK as far as I know. Would there be a way to setup tomcat so it always references a jdk on the thumb drive (rather than using the system JAVA_HOME variable)? How about Eclipse?

I'm thinking something like cygwin would clearly be overkill...

Answer 1

tomcat is pretty easy.

There is a standard batch file called setenv.bat in <tomcat-dir>/bin which is called by catalina.bat you could set this up to reference a relative path for the JDK.

An example of doing this is the liferay tomcat distrabution, have a look at it's setenv.bat file.

liferay 6.0.1 setenv.bat checks for a JRE installed in the CATALINA_HOME directory:

if exist "%CATALINA_HOME%/jre1.5.0_22/win" (
    if not "%JAVA_HOME%" == "" (
    set JAVA_HOME=
    )

    set "JRE_HOME=%CATALINA_HOME%/jre1.5.0_22/win"
)