Eclipse Java -- Classes Will Not Build

We had an interesting problem.  After checking out the latest project out of our repository (Subversion), we couldn't get a build.  After a clean, the WEB-INF/classes directory was empty.  We checked the build path stuff under the project properties.  All was in order.  We rebuilt several times.  Nothing.

It turns out that somehow a corrupted .classpath file was checked into the main trunk.  This is the .classpath file automagically generated by Eclipse.  When we reverted to the previous version of the .classpath file, everything worked and we got a build.

Hope this helps someone.

Tomcat Startup Problem

I had a strange issue. I used Apache Tomcat with Eclipse, and all of a sudden, Tomcat wouldn't start. It threw the exception:

java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: org.apache.catalina.loader.DevLoader

This was strange.

There are two fixes. DevLoader is not provided with Tomcat, so you can put the DevLoader jar in your classpath.

Or:

You can navigate to ~tomcat_home/conf/Catalina/localhost/. In that directory, you will find a file with the name of your project and the .xml extension. It is a context.xml file. Open the file with a file editor.

You will find this line:

Remove the line and Tomcat will start again.