Running Apache Tomcat on Mac OSX

Here is a great link for getting Apache Tomcat setup to run easily on Mac OSX.

Once you download Tomcat and extract the files from the zip there are a couple of things you need to do from a terminal in the tomcat/bin folder:

chmod 755 *.sh 



You might also want to delete the *.bat files because you cannot use them anyway:

rm *.bat

There is also a nice shell script in the link above that will let you start and stop tomcat by typing in 'tomcat start' or 'tomcat stop' from a terminal window.

Setup environment variables in Mac OS when using Eclipse

While trying to get Eclipse Ant builds working on Mac OS I found that I needed to setup environment variables.  Normally in Linux and Windows I knew how to do this, however things are a little different on the Mac.
Using help from this link I was able to add the appropriate variables that I needed to run my Ant builds in Eclipse.
Basically from a terminal you would use the following command:
sudo vi /etc/launchd.conf


Then add add entries as necessary:

setenv GWT_HOME /Users/hathaway3/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.2.1.0_2.1.0.v201010280102/gwt-2.1.0

setenv GWT_INCUBATOR /Users/hathaway3/eclipse/plugins/com.google.gwt.eclipse.sdkbundle.2.1.0_2.1.0.v201010280102/gwt-2.1.0


The only bad thing is that you must reboot after making these changes.