Jetty is the easiest servlet container to deploy Tapestry into, it just plain works.
The easiest way to develop Tapestry applications is to run Jetty embedded inside your IDE. If you use Eclipse, then the Jetty Launcher plugin is invaluable. The Tapestry 5 Tutorial discusses installing and using Jetty Launcher.
Jetty Launcher only works with Jetty 4 or 5 and not Jetty 6.
A newer and better maintained and supported Eclipse plugin, Run Jetty Run is now available. It allows Jetty to be used without a separate Jetty install.
Tapestry, in its default configuration, expects Log4J version 1.2.12 or better (it makes use of the isTraceEnabled() and trace() methods, introduced in version 1.2.12.
You may have to replace the version of Log4J in your Jetty's ext directory with a newer version.
If you enable debugging output for your page and are using an older version of Log4J, you will see output in the console an incredible amount of trace output concerning every aspect of rendering the page; this is because with Log4J 1.2.11 and earlier, the trace output level is merged into the debug output level.