It's so easy to run Tomcat 7 (or 6 if you want) in your Maven project. Just add corresponding groupId, artifactId and version to your pom.xml.
<plugin> <groupId>com.googlecode.t7mp</groupId> <artifactId>maven-t7-plugin</artifactId> <version>0.9.10.M8</version> </plugin>
Start your build as usual with the following goal:
mvn t7:run
That's it.