Looking for a desktop environment to develop and test commercial-quality Java code, JSP's and Servlets? Prefer not to spend a small fortune for the software?

Here's a great alternative to high-priced, commercial software and you just can't beat the price! It's all either free and open source (or just free) and available for downloading on the internet (for commercial work or for provider support, some of the components have a price tag). The friendly folks who wrote “Core Servlets and Javaserver Pages: Advanced Technologies, Vol. 2 (2nd Edition),” have put together a Preconfigured Tomcat Version that saves time by including many of the changes you probably will want. After it's all set up you'll be able to make changes to your JSP's and see the effects in a browser. You'll also have many of the debugging features of the Eclipse environment available and the console will be live along with the Tomcat logs for bug tracing.

You can develop WAR files (Java Web Archive files) which can be dropped into the webapps folder of a Tomcat server. Tomcat will magically “explode” the WAR file into the appropriate folders. This makes transferring your website between servers a snap. If you select the option to include the java files you can also pass your WAR file to other developers who can unzip the WAR into a project inside Eclipse for further development.

This tutorial covers the basics of a JSP and Servlet development environment. It is recommended you learn these basics before moving on to Struts, Tiles, Validation and other advanced frameworks.

The following pages include the steps to load Java, a Tomcat JSP container which works as a server, the Eclipse IDE, and a MySQL database server. The versions are generally up-to-date as of Spring, 2008. Newer versions may be available but remember to confirm all the components will work together (especially important: make sure the Sysdeo plugin is compatible with Eclipse and the MySQL JDBC driver works with the version of MySQL). After the downloads are unzipped, installed and set up you will have eaten 600+ mb's. Even more as you begin to set up the workspaces and databases for development -- plan on a gigabyte of hard-drive space.

I suggest at least 512 mb's of RAM on an XP computer. More if your laptop allocates system RAM for video as most laptops do. Eclipse runs very well with a gigabyte of RAM and Windows XP. In my experience, Vista requires a dual-core processor and 2 gigabytes of RAM to equal the less powerful XP machine -- but, hey, that's progress (and why nerds like us are taking another long look at Ubuntu)!