The Java web applications that we develop have to be deployed in a servlet container. In this class, we are using Tomcat 6. We use Eclipse as IDE for the development, which integrates nicely with Tomcat. This page will describe how to configure Eclipse to use your Tomcat installation.
First a quick note on how you can run Tomcat though. Once you downloaded and installed Tomcat on your system, you can start Tomcat. How is start Tomcat depends on your system. If you have a Windows computer, you should have a program called Tomcat6w.exe, which provides you a graphical interface to interact with Tomcat. If you have a Mac, you can simply start Tomcat by typing
/Applications/apache-tomcat-6.0.44/bin/startup.sh
This of course assumes you installed Tomcat in your Applications folder.
On a Linux server, you might have a service installed to start Tomcat or you can do it similarly to the way you start Tomcat on a Mac.
service tomcat6 start