Installing the help system as an infocenter

You can allow your users to access the help system over the Internet or an intranet, by installing the stand-alone help system and the documentation plug-ins on a web server. The application accesses the documentation by calling a URL, and the help system is shown in their web browser. The infocenter help system can be used both for client applications and for web applications, either of which can have their help accessed remotely. All features except infopops and active help are supported.

Installation/packaging

These steps are for the help system integrator and web admin and are not meant to address all the possible scenarios. It is assumed that all your documentation is delivered as Eclipse plug-ins and, in general, you are familiar with the eclipse help system. For the end users, it is assumed that they have IE5.x or 6.x or Mozilla installed on their machines.

Make sure an application server is installed on the machine. We have tested with Tomcat 3 and Tomcat 4.
Download the Eclipse 2.0 Release level Platform Runtime Binary driver from www.eclipse.org.
Install (unzip) the driver to a directory d:\eclipse.
Register the Eclipse Help application residing in d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0 with the web server. Do not copy this directory elsewhere; it must remain in Eclipse installation tree.
In Tomcat this registration can be accomplished by adding the following lines to the tomcat\conf\server.xml file:
```
<Context path="/help"  docBase="d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0">
</Context>
```
In Tomcat 3 add the lines near end of the file, as the last element inside the ContextManager section. In Tomcat 4, add this section as the last element inside the Host section.
Install the following fixes, depending on which server you are using:
- Tomcat 3: Tomcat 3 does not have XML parser library available to a web application. To fix that, copy xercesImpl.jar and xmlParserAPIs.jar from d:\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.xerces_4.0.3\ to d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0\WEB-INF\lib\
- Tomcat 4: Both Eclipse and Tomcat contain code to set a URLStreamHandler, but it can only be set once. To allow both Tomcat and Eclipse to work correctly, a library d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0\infocenter\eclipseurl.jar needs to be added to the class path at Tomcat startup. In Tomcat 4.0.3 edit tomcat/bin/setclasspath.bat file and after the line:
```
set CLASSPATH=%JAVA_HOME%\lib\tools.jar
```
  insert the line:
```
set CLASSPATH=%CLASSPATH%;d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0\infocenter\eclipseurl.jar. 
```
  Replace the xerces.jar file in tomcat\common\lib with xercesImpl.jar and xmlParserAPIs.jar from d:\eclipse\plugins\org.apache.xerces_4.0.3
- Disable precompiled JSP's:. Unless you are using Tomcat 4.0.x or plan to ship the jasper jar files, you should also copy d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0\infocenter\web.xml to d:\eclipse\plugins\org.eclipse.help.webapp_2.0.0\WEB-INF.

Using the infocenter

Start the web server. Point a web browser to the path of the web application. On the machine the Tomcat is installed, this would be http://localhost:8080/help/.

Installing custom documentation

The Eclipse platform comes with its own documentation, contained in the org.eclipse.platform.doc.user plug-in. It will be available in the infocenter by default. To have you own documentation show up, package the documentation as Eclipse documentation plug-ins. Install them to d:\eclipse\plugins\.

Note: It appears that, in F3 build, the infocenter support using Tomcat 4.0.3 only works with JDK1.4.
JDK1.3 can be used to setup an older infocenter, present in Eclipse M5 build, later builds do not work with JDK1.3. New version of Xerces present in the newest drivers seems to cause the problem when used with this JDK.
With JDK1.3.1 we were unable to start Tomcat 4.0.3 at all.