Okay. I still don't know what I did wrong the first time, but I found a solution.
I went to the webapps directory, made a full
copy of the ROOT app and renamed it "copy". I noticed that this "copy" app works like a charm.
I also noticed that after all this screwing around, it also works like I thought it would in the first place! I can just go:
cd TomcatRoot/webapps
mkdir testApp256
cd testApp256
vim index.html
etc. and the page is accessible over WWW. The changes that I did to Tomcat when I took it out of the box include:
* set the
Connector and
Server ports in
conf/server.xml to ports recommended by my web server administration (in my case 38257 and 38255, respectively)
* set the Connector
proxyName and
proxyPort parameters in
conf/server.xml correctly (in my case "
http://www.mysite.com/me/tomcat" and 80
and probably something else. In the public_html/tomcat folder I have an
.htaccess file containing
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://localhost:38257/$1 [P]
After this, the Tomcat default page (but nothing else) was accessible over WWW. I don't remember clearly what else I might have done.
But now that it works, I don't want to touch anything to not break it again