Apache forks a child process with lower rights than root. App servers that run on port 80 do not without a native JNI lancher. The solution is native launcher, a router rule or iptables.

I think the parent is talking about living in a chmod 777 world. Or maybe he is tired of crazy symlink hacks so that sftp becomes an option. Some appservers put class cache in WEB-INF by default, etc.

See my post below: a non-priv'd user can't start the java app server on a port sub-1024 unless you mess with the OS to allow it. I just double checked with my jetty install and I got a "java.net.SocketException: Permission denied".