Getting tomcat to serve documents from directories outside of $TOMCAT_HOME

["Harding, David" <dh...@Thomcomp.com>]

i have installed and setup tomcat 3.1 and have all of the examples and one
of my own servlets working.

but when i try to take one of my own servlets (HelloWorld) and deploy it to
a user's home directory i get a ClassNotFoundError in the tomcat log.

TOMCAT_HOME
    /home/jakarta-tomcat

added contexts:
    /dharding   /home/dharding/webapp


i deploy this HelloWorld to /home/dharding/webapp and get the above
mentioned error (but tomcat is looking in the right place since i can put
html documents in that location and browse to them with no problems...it
just will not load servlets).

any ideas?  i am new to tomcat so i think i am missing something obvious,
but i do not want to have to become root to have a user deploy a webapp
(want the users to all have a /home/usernamehere/webappthat has a context
loaded in tomcat so each user can publish their own webapps, i read that
this can be done with multiple tomcats but woudl rather avoid that...kind of
like apache serving /home/usernamehere/public_html for
myhost.com/~usernamehere)

thanks in advance

cheers,
   david j harding