I have been doing some Tigase development within Eclipse and have the server able to be run and debugged from within it. The setup I am using is to have the main src code from Tigase in one project and then setup a second project that I call tigase-local. This project just contains the configuration files and maven dependency to the main Tigase project.
Once that is setup then I was able to figure out what flags were needed by looking at the scripts/tigase.sh file along with the etc/tigase.conf file. In your run configuration you should have the following settings:
Main Class: tigase.server.XMPPServer
Program arguments: --property-file etc/init.properties
VM arguments:
-Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 -Dsun.jnu.encoding=UTF-8
-Djdbc.drivers=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver:org.postgresql.Driver:org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver
-server -Xms100M -Xmx200M -XX:PermSize=32m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:MaxDirectMemorySize=128m
You will want to change the jdbc.drivers to contain the drivers you need to connect to your database backend.
That should be it and you then can run / debug the Tigase server itself.