Although Jumpstart is a great way to make your first steps with RIFE, i was personally quite reluctant to use Jetty as container, since all my apps run on Tomcat. It was not so simple to have RIFE, Eclipse and Tomcat work together, but i managed to have it all work, so i finally made this tutorial, in hope it will be usefull.

Prerequisites :

You must have installed :

Eclipse 3.1
Tomcat 5.5
Sun's JDK 5.0

Be aware that previous versions of these programs should also work.

First, we'll go through the configuration of Tomcat to work with Eclipse.

Create a java project

Open Eclipse, create a Java project as usual, let's call it myproject.
Select java application and click new.
In your new project, create a folder named TOMCAT.
In this new folder, copy from your local Tomcat install folder, the 3 following folders and their content : conf, logs, work.

Then (in eclipse), create a file myproject.xml under TOMCAT/conf/Catalina/localhost, containing the usual stuff.

Then go to menu Run > Run...

In the main tab :

Give this launch configuration the name you want, i named it "launch Tomcat"
In "project", select the project you just created ("myproject").
In main type, type "org.apache.catalina.startup.Bootstrap".

In the JRE tab :

Make sure you selected the right JDK (5.0)

In the arguments tab :

-Dcatalina.home points to your local Tomcat installation directory
-Dcatalina.base= points to the "TOMCAT" folder of your new project

In the classpath tab :

Select user entries, and click Advanced... Then "choose add classpath variables" and create a TOMCAT_HOME pointing to your local Tomcat install folder.
Click ok.

Click "advanced" again, then "choose add classpath variables".
Select the TOMCAT_HOME variable you created, then click "extend"and point to TOMCAT_HOME/bin/bootstrap.jar.

Put in some source code with the help of your favourite web framework, and you're done ! Run your new configuration and you'll see Tomcat running in your eclipse console.

Enable RIFE

And now, feel free to download RIFE distribution, and unzip to the folder of your choice. In eclipse, you should have something like this :

Drag n' drop rife.jar to the lib folder.
Copy web.xml from RIFE, to your web\WEB-INF folder.
At web\WEB-INF, create the following folders :

• src\rep
• src\elements
• src\templates
• src\sites
• src\implementations

Right click your project root > Build path > configure build path...
Add source : select WEB-INF\src and WEB-INF\src\implementations. Don't forget to add exclude folder "implementations" from src !

Finally, you're done. Of course, feel free to save this project and use it as a template, in order to avoid to follow this procedure everytime you start a new RIFE project.