Last Updated: February 25, 2016
·
9.937K
· thedispossessed

Complete refresh of a web application in Eclipse for Java using Tomcat

"Oh no! I edited lots of stuff, waited for it to run for 5 minutes and nothing's changed! I'm pretty sure my code was right? Nooooo!"

Or something in the lines of that. The problem just might be that your web application isn't fully refreshed. How does one do a full refresh of a web application?

  1. Right click on your project, click Refresh. Wait for it to finish.
  2. Right click on the server you're running your web application in, on the Servers tab. Click on Clean Tomcat Work Directory... (Yeah, the three dots are there.) Again, wait for it to finish.
  3. Right click on that server again, and now, click Clean... (There it is again, the three dots.) You need to wait for this to finish too.
  4. On the menu bar, click Project, then click Clean... (three dots strike back!) again and then choose your pick, before clicking OK. It is worth noting though that if you have any work ethics, you will not have an Eclipse work space full of different projects because that would eat too much resources and it makes you look like a klutz. For the last time, wait for this to finish.

Now you can try running your application and I guarantee 100% your code will run with your changes, with all the new errors you've introduced by fixing the old ones. Success?