Issues getting webapp working under Tomcat

We want to have as2 running from within a Tomcat instance, but the webapp seems to have multiple problems.

1. The servlet mapping for ServerStatus had to be moved to after the servlet declaration.
2. The jars within the subdirs under WEB-INF/lib didn't seem to get recognized. Copied all of them to the WEB-INF/lib directory.
3. (Not a Mendelson issue) had to create a new "monitor" tomcat role, and assign it to a user.
4. Now when I try to hit the URL http://localhost:8080/as2 I get a NullPointerException that seems to be resulting from an attempt to establish a connection to a database. Are there instructions for what kind of database connection it is looking for, what keys to add to JNDI for the connection, what tables are required, etc?
5. This will be running on a Unix system if we are able to get Mendelson working to serve our needs. It will need to be headless (e.g. no UI except the webgui). I noticed in the forums that someone had done a patch for -nogui. Was this incorporated into the source tree?

Based on the issues I'm seeing under Tomcat that I had to resolve, am I the only one trying to get this working in this type of environment, or was the app just tested with an old version of Tomcat?