Start Apache Tomcat outside of Netbeans IDE

I'm in the process of trying to learn more about Java Servlets & JSP, using the NetBeans IDE and using a plain old text editor. I'm planning on going through an online NetBeans E-commerce tutorial, and using a book which leads you along without the use of an IDE. The online tutorial is obviously going great since it shows you the steps using the NetBeans IDE. However, the question I have is in regards to the other tutorial I would like to start on (the book).

I'm a noob when it comes to Apache and configuring your development environment, so this may seem like a dumb question. I would like to start Tomcat manually (outside of the NetBeans IDE) to work on the book's tutorial. However, it seems the install of Apache that came along with the "Full" download of NetBeans is not installed as a service, nor does it show up under the list of installed programs on my Windows 7 machine. So I'm kind of lost as to how I can configure it to start manually. I was thinking of downloading the msi installer for Tomcat, but then I would have to wonder if g开发者_StackOverflowetting it to work with NetBeans would be a problem as well.

Can anyone point me in the right direction? I've tried starting it using startup.bat in the /bin directory of ApacheTomcat but all it does is open cmd.exe for a split second, and localhost:8080 in my browser does nothing.

Once again, I apologize for the dumb question.

Don't click on startup.bat, but run it from the command prompt. You will see the errors and will be able to rectify them. It's likely that some envrionmental variables are not set. See these instructions how to do that (may need to find a similar section in the docs that correspond the release of Apache Tomcat you have installed).

Alternatively, download the most recent version of Apache Tomcat from http://tomcat.apache.org/ and install it as a service.