For development/deployment, read this (and every linked page under 'Table of Contents'):
http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/appdev/index.html As for the other questions... understand the following about Tomcat and webapps. Webapps are configured through a web.xml file. web.xml is ALWAYS located in the WEB-INF directory of your application. It's DTD is extremely self-documenting.
Download this DTD and view it with a text viewer. IE tries to parse the DTD as XML and apply it's default XSL stylesheet and fails (duh). You'll need to use Netscape or wget to retrieve the dtd.
update: I've just tried it with IE, and it seems to work. Perhaps that was a different file I was remembering. YMMV.
The Tomcat part to understand? Tomcat will read in $CATALINA_HOME/conf/web.xml and apply all the settings in this file as the DEFAULTS for any application deployed. So, to override any of those settings for a particular application, you'd make an appropriate entry in that application's WEB-INF/web.xml file.
global.asa -> this is an ASP thing? I don't know how ASP does it, but in JSP-land, application-level parameters are configured through web.xml. As a hint.. you're looking for <context-param>
session-timeout -> is also in web.xml. You are looking for <session-config>
default web page -> you get one guess.
You are looking for <welcome-file-list>
If you don't download the DTD, then there are some minimal comments within the CATALINA_HOME/conf/web.xml that will help you out.
[ October 03, 2003: Message edited by: Mike Curwen ]
