Answering my own question on this, as neither solution offered what I was looking for.
Firstly, I downloaded and compiled the apache mod jk_serv; following this, I configured a worker, under workers.properties with the following;
workers.tomcat_home=/opt/apache-tomcat-7.0.50
workers.java_home=/opt/jdk1.7.0_51/
ps=/
worker.list=ajp13_worker
worker.ajp13_worker.port=8009
worker.ajp13_worker.host=localhost
worker.ajp13_worker.type=ajp13
worker.ajp13_worker.lbfactor=1
worker.loadbalancer.type=lb
worker.loadbalancer.balance_workers=ajp13_worker
Following this, under apache's conf.d, I set up a worker config to be loaded by apache, as follows;
LoadModule jk_module modules/mod_jk.so
JkWorkersFile /etc/httpd/conf/workers.properties
JkLogFile /var/log/httpd/mod_jk_log
JkShmFile /var/log/httpd/jk-runtime-status
JkWatchdogInterval 60
JkLogLevel info
JkMountCopy All
# all the contexts:
JkMount / worker1
JkMount /*.jsp worker1
Finally, I set up a script that would update tomcat's server.xml, to add any relevant vHosts that were added to httpd.conf.
With this, jsp files are now processed on-the-fly; without the need for uploading seperate WAR's.