This plugin provides a mechanism to automatically generate a .tomcatplugin file for use with the Sysdeo Tomcat Eclipse Plugin. You would use this plugin if you were developing web applications in Maven 2, and you wanted to automatically generate the classpath that is used by the Sysdeo Plugin.
If you rely on the default classpath resolution mechanism in the Sysdeo Tomcat Eclipse plugin, you'll find that the plugin is going to add all the dependencies listed in a project's pom.xml to the Sysdeo Tomcat classloader. This causes time consuming and frustrating problems when dependencies with provided scope are added to the Sysdeo Tomcat plugin's classpath. Using this plugin allows you to build a war packaged project and generate a .tomcatplugin that is going to omit all dependencies marked as provided.
Another important feature of this plugin is that it allows you to add context.xml information to the .tomcatplugin file automatically. If your web application references JNDI environment variables, and you are deploying to tomcat, your web application is going to have a context.xml file in src/main/webapp/META-INF. To use the Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin successfully, you'll need to add this information to the .tomcatplugin file usually by right-clicking on your Eclipse project and adding the information to the "extra context information" under Tomcat. This plugin will automatically grab the context information from your web application's context.xml and put it in .tomcatplugin. (Note: The location of your context definition is a configurable property of the generate goal.)
To use this plugin you must be running Eclipse 3.1 or higher, and you should have already installed the Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin. After installing the Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin, you should follow the directions on the Sysdeo Site to unpack the DevLoader.zip file in your $TOMCAT_HOME/server/classes directory.
This plugin supplies a single goal "generate" which must be run after the eclipse goal. (i.e. mvn eclipse:eclipse sysdeo-tomcat:generate)
For more information about how to use and configure this plugin see "Using the Maven 2 Sysdeo Tomcat Plugin.
