Is it possible to distribute Tomcat by Java Web Start and run it from there?
My application shall run within its own Tomcat server on the machine it is deployed on. Can I package Tomcat and the client application into one Java Web Start archive and run the Tomcat server and the client once the user has downloaded the Java Web Start archive?
This might be possible if you signed all the jars correctly. But, it seems like this is quite a heavyweight solution. Have you considered doing this with Jetty?
You cannot run a full blown Tomcat as it expects a certain layout in the filesystem and scripts and more.
You can however run an embedded web server in an application where you control it completely. I have done that with Jetty. You might find http://stackoverflow.com/questions/640022/howto-embed-tomcat-6 interesting.