And I was about 1-1/2 steps away from that trick on #5. I was just starting to get frustrated at doing the whole war file generation and was wondering if I could get Tomcat to look at before Maven bundles it all up... Or even after IntelliJ does it's own build.

I'm only using IntelliJ because that's what everyone else uses for Java. And we've got licenses. I'm tempted to go back to vi (which I use for the older PHP app) but I still need the raw Java help (I like the auto-import, for instance). I coudn't make Eclipse see an existing SVN checkout, but that was before I started learning Java. I hadn't heard of NetBeans.

You'd think Tomcat's predilection to throw away a configuration file that it didn't even create would be a reported bug. (Now that might be entertaining.) Glad I'm not the only one struck by that one!

Wade.