A good IDE can help most of the issues you mention. Eclipse is free and you can compile Java web apps in it without Ant. I've worked places whose deployments in

A good IDE can help most of the issues you mention. Eclipse is free and you can compile Java web apps in it without Ant. I've worked places whose deployments involved making a WAR file from Eclipse. Configuring Tomcat in Eclipse takes a few clicks to basically just point to where you have your Tomcat directory. Compiling from Eclipse requires you to click a green arrow icon.