Im teaching myself servlets, found some very good tutorials and have great success in Eclipse Neon EE. (very basic servlet that just serves a simple static web page)
I installed Tomcat standalone before installing Eclipse Neon EE, and tested it and I get the regulat apache tomcat page. The tutorials I found also guided me on how to set up the tomcat server in Eclipse. They also showed me how to create a project and servlet. Even though I use 3.1, I still have Eclipse create the web.xml file.
When I run my servlet, Eclipse starts up Tomcat and does everything, and opens a browser tab within Eclipse and it takes me to http://127.0.01:9999/first/Hello and it serves up my web page. No problem. So now I export my project as WAR file, tell Eclipse to put the .war file right in my tomcat8's ROOT dir. Then i stop the tomcat8 server in eclipse and shut down eclipse. Then I use startup.bat and tomcat comes up, but then I cannot surf to http://127.0.01:9999/first/Hello from this same PC, it just gives 404 with "The origin server did not find a current representation for the target resource or is not willing to disclose that one exists."
Im not quite sure what steps I am missing?