We use NetBeans 6.7.1 to develop Web Apps and deploy to Tomcat 6.
Because we have customized Tomcat (slightly now, possibly more in the future), we keep both our NetBeans projects and Tomcat under source code control (svn). We've been careful to make all jar file references using relative paths. This makes the entire working directory location and name independent.
Unfortunately, I've not found a way to configure a server in NetBeans using a relative path (from the WebApp project) so that we always build and run on the Tomcat instance checked out to the working directory.
Instead, we must keep a copy of Tomcat in a fixed location. This makes is hard to keep changes in sync with the "master" copy in the working directory and does not allow different working copy revisions to use its own Tomcat revision in the same working directory.
This was just an inconvenience before, but now we are starting to use Hudson for continuous integration builds. I want to keep the build tasks independent of each other and I want to use the existing NetBeans build.xml files. However, I don't think it is practical to have to install Tomcat at an absolute path in order to build the web app projects.
Anyone have any ideas for a solution?