In the past when I needed to run something on Tomcat, I just made a .war file and deployed it.
While that is a common way to do things in the Tomcat world (it seems), I was taking a hit with downtime when I was trying to deploy a new .war file.
The web application would not get served up while the new .war was getting uploaded, and then Tomcat rebooted (to my best memory a new .war required a reboot).
Is that common to have that kind of downtime when installing a new .war file each time? Or was I doing something wrong? Is there a more correct way to deploy new versions of the application on Tomcat without needing as much or any downtime?