3.2.4  Concluding the Introduction to Application Development with Tomcat 

Section 3.2 has given a detailed introduction to setting up a development environment for Web 

applications using Tomcat and CVS on the Linux operating system. 

Most tasks have to be performed manually. While the process of registering servlets, managing 

CVS, and building the application with a make file seem tedious compared to the development 

with IDE's, the demonstrated approach gives the development team good control over the 

product, as well as flexibility. However, the author encourages the reader to consider other 

development environments, such as Enhydra, which provide a richer set of tools to create a 

Web application faster (e.g. wizards to set up a source tree, integration with IDE's). 

3.2.4.1  Debugging with Tomcat 

A difficulty that the developer faces is the lack of a real debugging tool for servlets. Since a 

servlet can be tested only from a browser, and stepping through a servlet line by line is 

therefore not possible, debugging can become a time consuming task. Therefore, you should 

apply extra care when developing a servlet, and make good use of status outputs with the 

System.err.println() command, for example. There are IDE's available that can be used with 

Tomcat to improve debugging issues, such as Borland's JBuilder. Please refer to Borland's Web 

site at 

http://community.borland.com/article/0,1410,22057,00.html

 for additional information 

(JBuilder is not Open Source software, but the Foundation Edition V3.5 is available free of 

charge). 

3.2.4.2  Multiple Developers with CVS 

The small size of the Web application example presented above did not really allow for showing 

the advantages of the central CVS repository that was created for the application source code. 

The following is a brief explanation of how other developers can access the code. 

Any member of the development team that is part of the group owning the repository can 

checkout the code to his/her home directory and independently work with it. A user x would 

simply use the following commands to obtain a fresh local copy: 

$ cd ~

$ cvs co myApp

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