blackdown java and tomcat and ant

[Heitzso <xxh1@cdc.gov>]

Hello,

<background>
I'm a java developer who recently switched over
to debian from rh.  I'm running unstable/woody.
Most of my java vms that had run fine on rh 6.2 break
on debian because of libraries compiled under.
So I hooked into blackdown's deb packages for
woody via apt (apt's great!).  I haven't run anything
yet but it's all installed.
</background>

<questions>
I use netbeans ide and it's looking for an
environment variable that points to the base
directory of the jdk.  But with the deb package
install is there a single directory root that
this corresponds to?

Is there a paper somewhere on the web on rolled
into doc that describes how java/jar/class files
fit into debian/linux file system?

We (Census/CDC distributed data project)use ANT 
for a standardized build and TOMCAT for our 
reference implementation (servlet 2.2 container).
I'ld like to see these become packages.  There
are quite a few packages I'ld like that require 
"httpd" but I don't want to load apache (or boa
or ...) if I'm really wanting TOMCAT (or Jetty...).
Is there someone working on turning these (TOMCAT, ANT, etc.)
into packages and/or can I pitch in to make this
happen?
</questions>

Thanks for help,
Heitzso
xxh1@cdc.gov