Consider a Local Tomcat Configuration One has to specify catalina.home and catalina.base Both settings are store globally in the Idea configuration. Shouldn't the catalina.base be stored along with the project. catalina.base is where the tomcats server.xml is taken from from, and hence where you configure global JNDI resources. We store the catalina.base directory in subversion along with the project so that configuration changes follow the projects (branching and so on) Another problem is that it's not possible to configure the shared classloader. Our product is a based on JSR-178 portlets and here a lot of code needs to be placed on a shared classloader, since the portlets are grouped in several war files. So it would be really nice if we could manage that classloader from within Idea We can of course use a Remote Tomcat configuration, but that means we have to do deployment outside of Idea which isn't all that nice This is not a problem that is specific to Tomcat - its the same deal with weblogic atleast