I have added recently the support for standalone tomcat instances and running applications in those tomcat instances.

For example, to initiate a great hudson (contineous integration), you can run the following:

If you are not inside a minitage environment:

easy_install -U minitage.paste.extras
paster create -t minitage.instances.tomcat myproject # it will ask you for the location of a tomcat extracted tarball
paster create -t minitage.instances.hudson myproject

And if you are not inside a minitage environment, to deploy in a myproject subdirectory