Eclipse WTP Server start hangs… on Windows…
We have a strange animal: A web application with really lots of jars. (Today total of 273 JARs.)
We use Maven 2, Eclipse with WTP, Tomcat, Q4E, etc.., but from these technologies only Eclipse, WTP and Tomcat are relevant for the problem I’d like to describe. Most of developer machines runs Windows XP, and some Windows 2000, and just few Linux.
As we use Maven 2, the jars came form ${user.home}/.m2/repository/ folder. We just let Q4E set up the path for our projects inside Eclipse. For some reason we stack with Q4E 0.3.0, and we tweaked the WTP Server (Tomcat) launch settings, to have all JARs included. We did not used “served modules without publishing”, nor “J2EE Module Dependencies” for few (here) non-relevant reasons.
After adding few new modules (JARs) to the webapp, for few developers the Tomcat Server just failed to start. No log, and nothing in the debug view, nor in the error view. Eclipse WTP were just waiting for Tomcat to start… forever… We were bitterly searching for solution/bug. With no luck. After adding even more JARs, even more developers were complaining: the same problem.