A common question for someone just starting to develop with DSpace is how do others set up their development environment. Often times this isn’t documented anywhere, but a lot of time goes into researching the best way to set things up. Today I co-taught a class on customizing DSpace for TDL. One of the hand outs I created for the class is a simple how to setup DSpace, Eclipse, and Tomcat together for easier development. This is certainly not the only way to set up these tools, but it is the method most developers in TDL choose.

One thing to note is the use of Sysdeo’s Tomcat plugin vs. Eclipse’s WTP plugin for integration with Tomcat. I played around with the WTP tools that come standard with Eclipse and found them to be too buggy to rely on. I hope that future versions of Eclipse will iron out the kinks in WTP tools, but for now I’m going to stick with Sysdeo.

Versions:

• Eclipse 3.4.x
• Tomcat 5.x or 6.x
• DSpace 1.5.x

Howto: setup Eclipse, Tomcat, and DSpace