Yes, there are posts in forums on this, but none are resolved, and none propose a complete solution.  war files are the
accepted way of packaging a basic web app, and it seems that there should be a direct way to do this.

Yes, I will only get the web pages and compiled artifacts, no source code for beans and servlets, but they could be in a
separate source folder to be added in a separate step (as is the case when creating a web project from scratch)

Current paths include:

1. Unpack the war manually and create from resulting directory.
   Cons: a. yet more copies of the same files on my hard drive
         b. less-java-savvy users have no easy way to do this (basic route is to copy file, rename copy to end in .zip,
open in Windows default viewer as folder, extract all files - yes, I could unjar it or use Winzip, but why can't the
tool do that for me?)

2. Create as Java EE App with existing sources
   Cons: wizard expects a full EE app, so it only shows me Enterprise servers like Glassfish in the server list (not
Tomcat, which would be fine for apps using only JSPs and servlets). So I didn' follow this one all the way through.

It really seems like this would be easy to implement, since the process would be very similar to the create new webapp
from existing sources wizard