If you explicitly need to stop/start tomcat beforehand (I believe this resource does a restart after deploying your app) you can do that with the "service" resource built into Chef - though doing so may mean that you're restarting every time you converge the node, which is probably not what you're looking for.
If you're interested in trying out Chef - which seems like a good fit from your comment - read on.
For tomcat you could take a look at this community-provided cookbook, which contains resources that make it simple:
https://github.com/opscode-cookbooks/application_java
If you explicitly need to stop/start tomcat beforehand (I believe this resource does a restart after deploying your app) you can do that with the "service" resource built into Chef - though doing so may mean that you're restarting every time you converge the node, which is probably not what you're looking for.