title: Designer friendly JSP/Servlet web development in both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu, et. al.)
body: <p>I'm a front-end developer for my college JSP project and so far I was using Sublime Text 2 for writing markup and my CSS/Less and ran the project directly from Apache Tomcat configured manually where I placed my project directory in <code>webapps</code> folder, but later, the project required to use Servlets (obviously) and I realized the need of IDE, while my colleagues at the development part are now insisting to use IDE.</p>
  
  <p>We have ported the entire project to NetBeans 7.1.1 and so far, project works fine and NetBeans takes care of all the hassle of creating/managing Servlets and its web.xml configurations, but I mainly deal with the markup and Less, which is real tedious here. Following are the issues I face:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li><p>Less file is not syntax-highlighted at all. (although I referred <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3190029/add-syntax-highlighting-to-less-files-in-netbeans">this</a> way of adding Syntax highlight to <code>.less</code> files).</p></li>
  <li><p>Every time I make a change to markup or CSS, I need to hit F5 and wait till a new tab launches in browser to reflect the changes. (Refreshing page in the browser doesn't work as it used to work in my older way of JSP development). Imagine 10 tabs for 10 changes if I don't close the tab after I see.</p></li>
  <li><p>I've used jQuery a lot, and it really annoys me to see warnings in my <code>.js</code> files (I know NetBeans might be pointing to correct issues, but I simply don't want it to be "over-smart" with my code).</p></li>
  <li><p>A Web designer would know how frequent it is to "save-changes-to-css-and-refresh-page-in-browser". And the IDE just slows down this whole process.</p></li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I know the obvious advantages of using IDE, but is there any fix for above issues?</p>
  
  <p>Also, I tried porting my project to Eclipse (and it just went crazy on minified jQuery files), before turning to NetBeans, but it just refused to use relative paths for my <code>.js</code>,<code>.css</code> and <code>.less</code> in <code>&lt;script&gt;</code> and <code>&lt;alt&gt;</code> tags, even though all the files and folders existed within Web-Content directory. And all I got was 404 errors for my scripts and stylesheets, in spite the fact that I could access those files my manually visiting to URL. As follows:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;link rel="stylesheet/less" href="less/styles.less" media="all" /&gt;
  &lt;!-- Above line doesn't include the file and I get 404 error --&gt;
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>but</p>
  
  <pre><code>Visiting to localhost:8080/MyProject/less/styles.less 
     shows me its content in the browser.
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Also, I tried to work with Servlets without using IDE (my Java code is simple such that I don't feel any need of IntelliSense-like editing) and refered <a href="http://srikanthtechnologies.com/articles/j2ee/testservlet.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">this</a> link, and ya it works if I do it in the same way as explained, but I don't get why I need to specify <code>servlet-api.jar</code> of <code>apache-tomcat\lib</code> in <code>classpath</code> at the time of compilation inspite the fact that I have path to Apache's lib folder already added to <code>CLASSPATH</code> variable in Windows.</p>
  
  <p>I know there are too many questions within this single question that it is likely to be "moderated-out" by SO moderators but my all questions hint to a single problem of having to develop JSP/Servlets and designing the pages without using IDE, and just fairly capable text-editor AKA Sublime Text.</p>
  
  <p>Please suggest me a firm solution.</p>