I'm one of the developers working on the next version of Dogtag, the Public Key Infrastructure packages (pki-*) which is, as far as I can tell, the only Java Web app that actually ships in Fedora. PKI is an old project, and it has vestiges of many aspects of Java development that are just done differently today. We are looking to close the gap between where it is and where the Standard lies. As such, we have to figure out how to attack packaging the application. Part of that, for Fedora, is to establish the standard in the first place. Dogtag ships with a utility called pkicreate. This is an application that creates a Tomcat instance in (by default) /var/lib/pki-* and sets the ports, the SELinux policy, the config, etc. While I think it does more than it should, certain aspects of what it does are essential. For example, it handles all of the SELinux configuration for the Tomcat instance. Tomcat ships with SSL disabled, and without an AJP connector to apache. Thus, Tomcat can't serve over port 80 or 443, meaning that they can't be viewed by many people behind firewalls. pkicreate configures mod_proxy_ajp support. It performs the SELinux configuration for the HTTP ports (if they are different from 8080 and 8443 which should be handled by system policy), as well as the AJP port. Russ Alberry, on the Debian Java team, has propsed a deployment utility similar in scope to what pkicreate does, but for the general case: http://dep.debian.net/deps/dep7/ Fedora 17 and later will have JBoss, which has a different set of deployment rules. Geronimo is already part of Fedora, although I have to admit ignorance as far as how it would interact with Tomcat. Resin is a possiblity as well. So we don't want to hardcode the deployment approach to the Tomcat server. But, the Tomcat install should be supported first. For a directory standard, I would say that a Fedora Web app should not have to provide a .war file, but should be able to use the tool to produce one . Many web applications allow for post install customization. THe simplest case is that a Company wants to theme the application with its own images and CSS. If the web application is delivered in a .war file and expects to deploy this way on the Servlet engine, there is no way to customize it. Thus, Russ' approach listed above seems right on. The one thing I would adjust is that deployment as a war file should be an option, but not necessarily the prefereed option. MOst application servers have to unzip war files anyway, and it seems a waste and troublesome to zip up the file only to unzip it. I say war is the exception but not the rule. pkicreate is a Perl application. As such, I don't think it will gain wide acceptance in the Java community. But, it can server as a prototype for A Java based java-deploy-webapp. Here's a short list of functions that I think the deployment tool should handle beyond what is listed in Russ' propsal: 1. Configuring Security Realms 2. Configuring JDBC connections (It would be nice if it configured Postgresql and MySQL for JDBC, too....) 3. Configuring LDAP connections 4. Opening additional ports and providing SELinux configuration for them 5. Creating Symlinks for shared libraries to /usr/share/java and /usr/lib[64]/java 6. Registering generic Global scoped components that can be accessed via JNDI names. It is possible that the workflow for java-deploy-webapp could best be done using either Ant or Maven. However, I would not like to require a .pom or build.xml file as part of the deployment: Web apps should follow the standard, and requiring additional configuration should be supported but not the norm. Perhaps we look for something like /etc/webapp/name/pom.xml and, if it doesn't exist, generate it from a skeleton. Or, we can say that if they provide the pom.xml, then we support deploying this way, otherwise you are on your own.