Eclipse + JettyLaucher = Loving Web Development

An article by Glen    1 Comment

I’m working on my first serious web app for ages and taking the opportunity to learn SpringMVC in the process. I’ve been busy doing lots of client-side SWT programming and plenty of backend EJB stuff, but amazingly haven’t managed to do much in the web space for quite some time.

Anyways, I’ve been a longterm fan of Jetty – it starts in a flash, is easy to configure, has a tiny footprint and it’s Australian – what more could you ask for? Anyways, I was keen to see if to see if I could easily deploy my web app to Jetty straight from Eclipse.

Enter the JettyLauncher Plugin for Eclipse. Jetty was always designed to be embeddable, with a simple API for configuring your deployments programmatically. This plug in takes advantage of that embeddable API and embeds Jetty straight into Eclipse!

Once you’ve got it installed you can now go into your Run… menu in Eclipse and choose the “Jetty Web” option. From there you simply tell it the location of your project’s war directory, what context you want to expose it under in Jetty, and what port you want Jetty to run on. It’s a snack! Suddenly you have Jetty output in your Console window!

Because Jetty starts in a couple of seconds, I have found it’s a very snappy way to test our your webapp – especially when you’re learning a new framework at the time. I can hack my Spring context and restart in a flash, or just edit my Velocity templates straight in Eclipse and keep interacting with Jetty without any need to restart!

If you’re looking for a productive toolset for developing your web apps from within Eclipse, it’s definitely worth a look. Great stuff!