setup of eclipse project : tomcat server , jdk , external libraries and so on

Question

Hello

I'm a beginner java developer and i'm not very confident with java world tools.

i'm using eclipse helios, jsdk 1.5, axis2 plugin and tomcat 6.0.29 on windows to port a very old webservice , preaviosuly deployed on a websphere. I've added a tomcat server to my eclipse project, when i start the server i get the following message : the APR based Apache Tomcat Native library ... etc ... was not found on the java.library.path . How do i change that variable (or any environment variable in general ) from inside eclipse ?

Then i've another problem i don't know if can be solved with some kind of configuration : i must use some third party .class library grouped togheter into a zip file. I've added the zip to the shared.loader property of the tomcat catalina.properties file and my project can't see them. If i rename the .zip file to .jar everything works fine . How can i use classes inside zip file without renaming it to jar ?

thank you in advance

Answer 1

A Jar is based on the same format as that of Zip. All the third party classes are bundled as Jars (Java Archives) and should be used like that instead of Zip. So if you happen to have a zip housing your classes you should rename it to jar as per java's conventions.

Answer 2

You can check where java.library.path variable is pointing to? using System.getProperty("java.library.path"); and see if the native libs are present in there..you should use the jar instead as its the standard format for archiving java class files

Answer 3

when i start the server i get the following message : the APR based Apache Tomcat Native library ... etc ... was not found on the java.library.path

The exact message is:

INFO: The APR based Apache Tomcat Native library which allows optimal performance in production environments was not found on the java.library.path

As you can see, the message is logged as INFO and the easiest thing would be to ignore it, especially in a development environment. But if want to make things more complicated, go to the Apache Portable Runtime (APR) based Native library for Tomcat and follow the install instructions.

(...) I've added the zip to the shared.loader property of the tomcat catalina.properties file and my project can't see them. If i rename the .zip file to .jar everything works fine . How can i use classes inside zip file without renaming it to jar?

In other words, using a (standard) *.jar worked, but a *.zip didn't. I'm tempted to answer: use a .jar extension.