Some day I had problem with deploying project from Netbeans to Tomcat (you may look to similar discussion on StackOverflow: Starting of Tomcat failed from Netbeans 7.3). Unfortunatelly, any of suggestion didn’t help, so I wrote my own deployer in Windows batch.

Some code:

ECHO AutoDeploy to Tomcat

SET tomcat_path=C:\TOMCAT
SET build_path=D:\SVN\SMOK_ELTE\JAVA\amfgw\build\web\WEB-INF\classes

::Stop Tomcat
echo Stop Tomcat, press any key to continue...
pause

netstat -a -n | findstr :8080 > NUL
if %errorlevel%==0 ( goto :stoptomcat ) else ( goto :next )
:stoptomcat
echo Closing Tomcat.
call %tomcat_path%\bin\shutdown.bat
goto :next
:next

::Copy compiled classes from Netbeans to Tomcat
XCOPY %build_path% "%tomcat_path%\webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\classes" /E /C /R /I /K /Y

::Run Tomcat
CALL %tomcat_path%\bin\catalina.bat jpda start

But I wanted more – let Netbeans run this script after building my application.

Edit build.xml file, located in project directory, by putting these lines:
<target name="-post-compile">
<exec dir="." executable="cmd">
<arg line="/c D:\scriptLocation\deployOnTomcat.bat"/>
</exec>
</target>