When you deploy a web app into Tomcat by putting the WAR file into the webapps directory, Tomcat unpacks it, creates the context directory (MyTestApp in this example), and the only new thing you’ll see is the META-INF directory (with the MANIFEST.MF file) inside. You will probably never put anything into the META-INF directory yourself, so you’ll probably never care whether your app is deployed as a WAR unless you do need to specify library dependencies in the MANIFEST.MF file.