There is another way. Tomcat has a manager web interface where you can go in and reload a specific context at any given time.
The reloadable attribute will work, but unless I am mistaken, it is not an immediate reload because Tomcat polls in a round robin kind of way to see if anything has changed. I don't know what the time criteria is though.
As far as the whole reloadabe issue goes, I hope you know that
you should only use the reloadable attribute in
testing cases rather than production, because it is a huge overhead for Tomcat and will degrade performance quite a bit.
BTW - Depending on what tomcat version you may be running, the manager app is located as a link on the default index.jsp page that Tomcat ships with.