I use in all my web based Java application Tomcat as an IDE and Sysdeo Tomcat launcher for web container starting and stopping. Every project has it’s own configuration of Tomcat launch process. And if you have many workspaces (e.g. couple of ongoing branches – release on production, development version, etc.) you must configure this plugin each time you create a new workspace. If you’re using standard configuration, the only thing you have to do is specifying Tomcat home directory. Whilst, if it is needed to allocate more memory or enable JMX ports, you encounter the problem that you have to enter manually every single parameter in the JVM Settings dialog. There are no Copy All & Paste All functionality, and you can’t even copy configuration to send it to co-worker or to project wiki. Only one, IMHO, meaningless action you can do is dumping current configuration to the Eclipse log. However, output is messy and hard to read.

preferences

Today I decided to find out where this information is stored to know where to paste it next time. The search led me here:
workspace\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.debug.core\.launches\Tomcat 5.x.launch. This is the configuration file which stores everything you can edit through that dialog. Next time, I definitely will edit properties directly there.

configuration file

Also I finally defeated the problem connected to Hot Deploy feature being occurred after I moved to Eclipse Europa. Since that time, any code modifications caused Tomcat crash, even if signature of classes/methods weren’t changed. I had to restart it every time and it became tedious. The problem was eliminated after I removed reloadable="true" parameter in the web application context file.