Handling Tomcat in Eclipse: make it as easy as MyEclipse?

Question

I have been using MyEclipse for a number of years. I am coming to the conclusion that I would rather ditch MyEclipse and revert to plain old Eclipse, except for one detail: MyEclipse's Tomcat integration. Does anyone know of an Eclipse plugin that would provide such integration?

Here's what my current MyEclipse setup does, which I would like to preserve:

1. Integrates with my own external copy of Tomcat (the version I choose).
2. Start and stop that external server from within the IDE.
3. Takes care of Tomcat's buildpath, according to project's buildpath.
4. Deploys the project to that external copy (classes, libraries, resources and all).
5. Hot update of modified JSPs and classes.

In effect, I can sidestep Ant for most purposes, as long as I play inside the IDE.

With Eclipse, I know I can achieve 1. and 2. What about the other steps?

Note: Just in case this gets asked, why wanting to ditch MyEclipse?

• Avoid renewing the license.
• MyEclipse conflicts with SpringIDE.
• MyEclipse's JSP and CSS editors are a pain...

Answer 1

Re 3: Eclipse (specifically Web Tools Platform feature) can create build path from libraries in your Tomcat installation + libraries stored in WEB-INF/lib. Alternatively, you can set which libraries you want to have visible in Tomcat via "J2EE Module Dependencies" part of project properties.

Re 4: yes

Re 5: yes

Default JSP/CSS editors in WTP are the same as in MyEclipse I think.

WTP supports different modes of deployment. It can deploy to your existing installation, or it can create new Tomcat server locally (based on your existing settings, and using existing Tomcat installation), and deploy there... your developement Tomcat is completely separated this way. In addition, you can create multiple servers inside your Tomcat (I use it when working with different branches of same project), and start one which you want.

Answer 2

Re 2:Sysdeo plugin for eclipse supports of starting/Stopping from your IDE http://www.eclipsetotale.com/tomcatPlugin.html

Answer 3

Try the JEE version of Eclipse. The integration with Tomcat is pretty good.

(And I have used MyEclipse for quite a while too, too fragile in the corners, but I love their hot deployment.).