Thanks for your help. I alway REALLY appreciate when people are willing to help cuz I'm alway full of questions!
In my case, Tomcat is integrated with JBoss and in this version of it war files don't get expanded into a directory structure. I had to come up with a different solution.
For anyone reading this thread who may be interested, I found that there were 2 solutions to my problem. I tried both, and both worked. Don't know which one is best for my purposes, I'll have to do some testing.
Solution #1 - create a directory named uploads.war (or whatever name you want, just make sure the directory has a .war extension). For JBoss, I had to create a WEB-INF directory with a jboss-web.xml file that defined the context. Then from my "real" application I uploaded the graphic files to a hard coded location (/usr/jboss/server/default/deploy/upload.war). To read the files I used
http://www.mydomain.com/uploads/filename.gif. That works very well and is an interesting way of serving static content with JBoss/Tomcat.
The other solution was a lot more work for me to get going but I finally succeeded. I configured Apache to use Tomcat as a jsp container so I could then just put and get my graphics from docroot. The downside is Apache handing off requests to Tomcat so there is some time penalty involved, but I'm not sure how much yet. But, I don't have to do a port forward from 8080 to 80.
The first solution was something I wouldn't have thought of doing, someone else suggested it and I was suprised it worked but is the easiest -- took all of 2 or 3 minutes to implement. The second solution is more conventional but I had to recompile Apache2 (Red Hat 9 does a real strange install, with missing pieces, by default) and I had to compile the mod_jk2 connector, etc ... a lot more work and lots of questions on jboss.org before I got it working correctly.
