Day: 9 June 2008

Eclipse Help / Infocenter – External Web Application Mode

Previously in this blog, the Eclipse Help / Infocenter was discussed and details on how to set up the help for an RCP application were given. But often you want to have your help for an application online as well as part of the product, for example if the customer does not have the latest version of the product installed. Indeed the IBM and Eclipse web sites have what they call an Infocenter - an online version of their help system. In reality, when the Eclipse Help System is running, it runs as an embedded web server within your application. So in theory, it should be possible to deploy that as a standard web application. Quoting the Eclipse Help, "The help system can run in three modes: workbench (normal), infocenter, and standalone." Normal is when it is part of your application. Infocenter is when it runs as a seperate process acting as a web server. Standalone is when it is used outside of an RCP application. In fact, from Eclipse 3.4 upwards, it can also be deployed as a standard Java EE web application. The following blog shows how to deploy that help to a standard Java EE web server, namely Tomcat 5.5. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, there is no simple way to get this running. Neither is there any good tutorial showing how to overcome the pitfalls of the descriptions provided in the Eclipse 3.4 Help (search for WAR and you will get the details). Those details…

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