As I posted earlier I'm getting to deploy and test Alfresco and Pentaho on lots of app servers. Today I've been fighting with Geronimo and Alfresco. There are a couple of issues that need to be worked to make Geronimo happy.

• First: Unlike Tomcat, Geronimo validates the deployment descriptor against the schema so the <description> element must be first in several elements that it is not. I filed the problem under Alfresco Bug #34. I have also attached a substitute web.xml in case you want to try this at home.
• Second: You have to specify that some of the classes in the alfresco.war/WEB-INF/lib jars must be blocked from other class loaders like this;

    <hidden-classes><filter>org.springframework</filter></hidden-classes>
    <hidden-classes><filter>antlr</filter></hidden-classes>
    <context-root>/alfresco</context-root>
    <context-priority-classloader>false</context-priority-classloader>

• Third: You have to specify a dependency on the mysql jdbc driver also in the geronimo-web.xml, like this;

    <dependency>
      <groupId>mysql</groupId>
      <type>jar</type>
      <artifactId>mysql-connector-java</artifactId>
      <version>5.0.0-beta-bin</version>
    </dependency>

• This looks a lot like a maven dependency you might be thinking, and you'd be right but the <type> element is in a different place, and yes that was another forehead brusing experiment in irritation. I posted the geronimo-web.xml file here.
• Finally: Alfresco requires JSE 5.0 (so its not really supported on Geronimo but I love pain) so you have to disable the stuff in Geronimo that requires J2SE 1.4, namely you have to undeploy the DayTrader app and turn off anything in Console->System Module related to corba (i.e. geronimo/client-corba/1.1-SNAPSHOT/car).