setting the classpath for a webapp

[Peoter Veliki]

I'm a little confused about how Tomcat sets the classpath of the different webapps.  I thought that if you placed jar files in the webapps/myapp/WEB-INF/lib directory that they were automatically added to the classpath and that the webapps/myapp/WEB-INF/classes directory was also added automatically.    What I'm finding is that I have to set the classpath manually for each app in the shell that is used to start Tomcat.  Is this correct?  Do I need to package them into WAR files before the classpath is dealt with automatically?  Help?!   Thanks