It should be fairly straightforward. Both GlassFish and Tomcat are web application servers that run a webapp. Here's what you can do for starters:
- Install Tomcat on your Ubuntu machine at a location of your choice (e.g.
/var/tomcat
)
- Find the webapps folder for Tomcat instance. Tomcat deploys and runs all the webapps that are copied into this folder.
- Download MetaboAnalyst.war by clicking on the "Resources" link on the left hand side.
- Copy the downloaded war file (war is short for web archive) to the webapps folder.
- Start your Tomcat instance and point your browser to
http://localhost:8080
You should read up further here.
GlassFish too is a web application server. It comes with various tools to deploy your application and it also has a concept similar to Tomcat's webapps folder. GlassFish calls it the autodeploy folder. You can see the instructions here to do something similar with the GlassFish server. The instructions on the page you linked to asks you to use the "GUI Admin Console" with GlassFish, but it is not required to do what you want.
Based on this app (and your confusion), I actually tried to deploy the app in both Tomcat and GlassFish. I did everything I could with Tomcat and it does not work. In GlassFish, I just went to the admin GUI and then deployed the .war file. I gave it a context root m
and your app was available at http://localhot:8080/m
(there is a bug in GlassFish admin console in that it tries to provide a URL that does not exist in the DNS, but that's a different story). In general, both Tomcat and GlassFish leave a lot to be desired in terms of the developer experience. Sigh.
The Application screen-shots are:

Clicking on the "click here to start" link gives me:

The steps with GlassFish are:
- Install GlassFish
- Start the domain:
asadmin start-domain
.
- The admin GUI is available at
http://localhost:4848
.
- Click on Applications -> Deploy. Choose the war file on the file system.
- Deploy and choose the context root (e.g.
m
).
- Connect to
http://localhost:8080/m
.