[lucperkins]

I'm not much of a Java person myself, but our dev team has told me that the WAR + Tomcat route tends to work best on AppFog, at least at this point in time. This is also our recommended way of running other JVM-based languages.

[edwinnathaniel]

Your dev team is spot on. The Java market does not have a solid Cloud Platform so far because most vendors go their own way to support Java (Heroku and CloudFoundry are the example of going their own way).

The only Java-friendly PaaS so far is Jelastic simply because they support GlassFish and Tomcat utilizing standard deployment model. But Jelastic does not provide the infrastructure (data-center or AWS, whichever), they partner with hosting providers, which I think is not a great move.

If AppFog can come up with a more standard/sane Java PaaS model out there, you guys can win that particular market.

If I may suggest more:

1) Tomcat 7 instead of the older 5 or 6.

The JavaEE landscape has changed significantly from J2EE 4 to JEE 5 to JEE 6 in which each major version moves toward _way_ less code and reduce XML/settings/configurations to a very minimum.

2) TomEE (if possible, or as "add-on"/next-level offerings)

Tomcat 7 implements a subset of JavaEE 6 (known as the "web-profile": Servlet[controller], JSP[template], JSF[view/controller], Dependency Injection, JPA[orm])

Enterprises who are still in love with EJB 3.x need TomEE.

3) Maven for deployment (feature/option)

Use Maven for deployment.

[maxandersen]

[full disclosure: I work for Red Hat]

Try openshift.com, has full Java EE server with both free and supported options.