Henrik - thank you for this reply. As you may have seen I chanced upon a 
solution, by simply putting the classes folder under WEB-INF. However your 
q'n'd page will still be very useful.

The current 'Professional Java Servlets 2.3' uses Tomcat4, but I'll need 
to check the errata as I seem to have found a couple of typos.

Cheers
Jim

> Re: "Sorry to bother you with a beginner's question, but ..."

> Hi there!

> Check out this web page: http://www.nacse.org/~yoon/tomcat-howto.html
a> nd skip to section 6 which explains how to
d> eploy a servlet web application and create
s> ervlet & custom URL mappings for your app via the web.xml
f> ile (not as tricky as it sounds).