Using eclipse is really very simple, you only have to invoke ant once. Just add a launch configuration to your project that directly starts jetty and uses the build/webapp directory for the webapp.
Now build Cocoon once using ant, this creates the webapp directory, copies the samples etc; invoke the eclipse-project and eclipse-webapp targets. This updates your eclipse project, removes all jars from WEB-INF/lib and restores the cocoon.roles.
But why removing all jars? I used it the last weeks without removing the jars. Tomcat (http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/class-loader-howto.html) (and also Jetty from my experience) look first at /WEB-INF/classes, second /WEB-INF/lib/*.jar for the needed classes. This would also allow the outside usage of the webapp.
From now on you can directly compile, edit and debug in eclipse andsimply launch the jetty launch target from within eclipse. You only have to invoke ant if you change something in the configuration or the samples but not for java code. PS: I tried to created the launch configuration via ant but failed :(
I could neither run Ant inside Eclipse - the old endorsed libs problem, somebody mentioned it already on the list, but I don't know if this problem was solved.
Joerg
