I've finally installed jetty on my machine. I then got the sample web app code from jodconverter and used the "mvn package" command as instructed here: http://code.google.com/p/jodconverter/wiki/BuildingFromSource
I then change the name of the "...SNAPSHOT.zip" to "converter.war" and move that file into the webapps directory of my jetty6 installation directory.
the problem is that when I point my browser to localhost:8080/converter, all I get is a nice directory structure of the source code for jodconverter instead of the jodconverter web-app itself. what gives??