I am taking a class at Johns Hopkins entitled "Web Application Development with Servlets and JavaServer Pages (JSP)". The class is being taught by Marty Hall who wrote the textbook:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0130092290

Marty told us that to get started we need to install a JDK and set up Apache Tomcat as a server. Marty's website as directions on how to do this:

http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/

His directions are for people who code in a text editor like Notepad and compile on a command line. So of couse I deviated from his directions a bit since I wanted to use Eclipse. I got everything working properly in Eclipse and I successfully ran Test 1, Test 2, and Test 3 on the website.

So here's my issue:

When I write my .java files, Eclipse compiles them and put the corresponding .class files in the appropriate subdirectory inside my workspace directory. Then I have to manually copy these .class files to the appropriate subdirectory inside Tomcat's WEB-INF directory.

Marty's tutorial has a section on establishing a simpler deployment method:

http://www.coreservlets.com/Apache-Tomcat-Tutorial/#Simplify-Deployment

I'd like to do this in ant since I think it's a good thing to learn but I have no idea how to do this. Is there an easy way to just tell Eclipse to put the .class files somewhere else? Is ant the way to go? Or is that an overkill for such an easy task?

I'm using Eclipse 3.1 with Java 1.4.2 (Marty told us to avoid Java 1.5 because the deployment server at JHU on which our code must run doesn't support 1.5)

9/16/2005 4:10:30 PM