Debug codes on Tomcat in Eclipse

During the course of development of my hibernate-struts-laszlo application using Eclipse as IDE I came at a point where there was really a need to install debugging capabilities to Eclipse. The codes on which I had started to work on were becoming more and more complex and I was unable to proceed unless proper debugging was done to solve the bugs.

This is when I started a search for a proper debugger plugin which supports tomcat 5.X and I came across Sysdeo tomcat plugin for eclipse.

Installation is pretty straight forward:
1. Unzip the zipped file after you download it
2. Copy the contents of the unzipped file to Eclipse/plugins dir
3. Fire up eclipse and go to 'Window->Customize Perspective...->Commands', and check 'Tomcat' in 'Available command groups'
4. Set the Tomcat home directory: Window -> Preferences, select Tomcat and set Tomcat home

Thats it, if you don't see Tomcat in the commands view in Step 3, close Eclipse and on command prompt navigate to the eclipse directory and start it with the -clean command.. .. that is "eclipse -clean".

Three tomcat icons appear in your menu bar. If you want to debug a certain code jsp,struts, bean,etc.. just place a breakpoint next to the line where you want to start debugging in Eclipse, fire up tomcat by clicking on the start icon and thats it. Thats really cool cause you dont need to have tomcat started in debug mode... there is only one mode!

One thing to be noted is that at times you can see French text in the console when booting tomcat thats because the plugin was made by French developers but its not such a big problem for such a helpful tool.