One day someone will come up with a 'runnable war file' that contains the whole web application+container and does not require unpacking or other manipulation, entirely stand-alone.
Would it actually be that hard to put everything in a single jar file and generate a class to boot it? Is it more than tracing dependencies and setting up the servlet configuration? Admittedly I have avoided the whole Java infrastructure, but using Jetty as an embedded web server has been painless.