How SpringSource Toolsuite start its tc instance?

Question

What in hell happened under the hood, if I click the green 'Start the Server' button within the STS servers view ? I thought, the underlying CATALINA_HOME/bin/catalina.sh is started, but it seems thats not the case. I can comment the line starting the java process for 'start' (and 'run' too) in catalina.sh, but the tc is started nevertheless. The lauch configuration panel is also not very helpful: there are only program arguments (here 'start') and VM arguments (multiple -Dsomething... values) but no executable file, jar or similar. Can somebody enlighting me !

Answer 1

TC Server from STS is launched in pretty much the same manner as Tomcat from regular Eclipse J2EE IDE (using WTP). The server is started using bootstrap.jar. You can find it in ClassPath tab of your launch configuration.

The start parameter mentioned is used as a arg for main method of Bootstrap class located inside bootstrap.jar