RE: [platform-help-dev] Eclipse Help in our own Tomcat

[Dorian Birsan <birsan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

> Dorian, I will do the leg work but I need some hooks.
>  
> Has Tomcat been MODIFIED to work under Eclipse
or is it STANDARD TOMCAT?

Slight modification. Check the about.html file inside
the tomcat plugin.

>  
> Any other useful pointers?

Search the archives of this mailing list, the eclipse.platform
newsgroup and look at the help code, starting with the org.eclipse.help.appserver
and org.eclipse.tomcat plugins, then the other eclipse help plugins.

Basically, tomcat is embedded in eclipse by passing
a custom class loader that allows each webapp (particularly the help webapp)
to have access to both the regular tomcat webapp class loader and to that
of a particular eclipse plugin.

If you want to embed the enitre eclipse (well, the
subset needed by help), you will have to worry about URL stream handlers
(both tomcat and eclipse define a factory), class loaders and any other
potential conflicts (such as xerces).

If you want to do a straight port, then you'll have
to implement some of the basic eclipse runtime functions that help makes
use of.