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.
Tapestry, in its default configuration, requires Log4J version 1.2.12 or better (it makes use of the isTraceEnabled() and http://logging.apache.org/log4j/1.2/apidocs/org/apache/log4j/Logger.html#trace(java.lang.Object)}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.