Tomcat and proxy settings

Question

There is a servlet running on tomcat7 and it makes a webservice call to a third party website. The call works fine from the windows machine but when run from tomcat it fails

Answer 1

No, Tomcat won't automatically use the system proxy settings.

I suggest you look into the facilities provided by java.net.Proxy. This allows you to dynamically specifiy a proxy at runtime. The system properties work but they are only read once, and if Tomcat has already used an HttpURLConnection for its own purposes prior to you setting them that's the end of that: the setting has no effect.