For folks outside of JavaEE, its common to deploy jars though. I have never run the software that takes .wars.
War files are not JavaEE, you might be thinking of EAR files.
A war file is just a jar file with a different name and manifest, and expects a few things, WEB-INF directory with a web.xml and that is about it.
More info can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WAR_file_format_(Sun)