Tomcat and Apache share the same root! Is that hazardous?

[Arne Borkowski \(borko.net\)]

Hi out there!

I am running the following configuration:

Apache/1.3.12 (Unix) mod_jk PHP/4.0.2 mod_ssl/2.6.5 OpenSSL/0.9.4 
on a RedHat 6.1 box with Tomcat 3.2.1 and Sun's JDK 1.3.0_02 and
Cocoon 1.8.2. 

And I wonder whether the following causes any of you to bang 
his/her head against the wall:

I have a context for Cocoon in Tomcat's server.xml and JSP, 
servlets and XML documents are all handled properly.

Now I instructed Tomcat via its server.xml to add a context 
path="/" with docbase="../apache/htdocs". In my apache root I 
placed the WEB-INF contents of webapps/cocoon/WEB-INF i.e. the
web.xml file (and currently the cocoon.properties). Now XML
files a handled "server wide" from the root down (Apache's).

As a result, Tomcat and Apache now seem to share the root path. 
That's pretty fine for me. But is it okay, at all? Is this kind 
of config likely to crash? Is it a security hazard? Did I open 
a backdoor to hell?

I apologize in advance if this is all too unprecise ... ask for
details if needed.
 
Any comments and/or hints (even if these point to somewhere else)
are higly appreciated.

Regards,

Arne Borkowski
Hamburg/Germany