Running Hadoop without bin/hadoop

[Michael Basnight]

I have a java app that runs in tomcat and now needs to talk to my  
hadoop infrastructure. Typically, all the testing ive done / examples  
show starting something that uses hadoop via the 'bin/hadoop -jar'  
cmd, but as you can imagine this is no good for a existing tomcat app.  
Ive looked thru the .sh files in the bin/ dir, and it would require  
extensive work to mod the script to export the env variables so that  
tomcat can be restarted without a special init script (and with those  
variables in tact). The last thing i want to do is hand crank files  
that may or may not change in new hadoop distros. Is there a known way  
to use the hadoop infrastructure outside of the bin/hadoop -jar command?

mb