We are going to use an extension of the Eclipse platform to help us write, deploy, and run this chapter's applications. To be more specific, we are going to use the Eclipse Web Tools Platform (WTP), which is a set of plugins containing tools for supporting the development and deployment of Java web-based applications. Among other things, using WTP, you can start, stop, and restart the web server from within Eclipse. Thus, you do not need to switch back and forth between Eclipse and Tomcat (or the server of your choice) as you deploy web applications. For an overview of all Eclipse WTP's plugins and their features, visit the project's site: http://www.eclipse.org/webtools/.
You can download Eclipse WTP as a binary distribution from the project site: http://download.eclipse.org/webtools/downloads/. Nevertheless, this is not the best approach. The most straightforward approach to get WTP up and running is to download the Eclipse version that is prepackaged with the...