Problem w/ Struts and VA for Java

[Tom Miller <tm...@kdsi.net>]

Struts people

I had great success using VAJ to develop Struts applications a few
months ago, but recently upgraded my Tomcat to 3.2.1 and Struts to
recent releases. I lost the ability to develop and debug my Struts
application classes within VAJ.

Craig's excellently clear message of Feb. 13th (#4566) entitled
'Classpaths and the "struts.jar" file' gave, I believe, the reason.
Craig explained that containers (esp. Tomcat 3.x and 4.x) use custom
class loaders that *must* find struts.jar and application classes in the
WEB-INF directories of the web app itself, in the file system. (See
Craig's message if you want to understand the reasons thoroughly)

VAJ is a self-contained environment and needs to be able to work with
imported source and internally generated classes. Unless there is
something that I am not understanding, it appears to me that after
Tomcat 3.x, Struts applications cannot be developed in VAJ. I'm very
aware that one can debug into classes external to VAJ, but that is far
short of being able to use all of the extremely powerful features of the
IDE.

A perhaps naive question would be whether there is any way for VAJ users
to temporarily inhibit Tomcat from employing specialized classloaders
for webapps just during development.

If anyone knows another workaround for this, I would love to hear it.
TIA
--
Tom Miller
Miller Associates, Inc.
tmiller@kdsi.net
641.469.3535 Phone
413.581.6326 FAX