I got tired of this same problem. I can't believe there is not a flag in tomcat to force it to compile jsp's on a deploy. I wrote a utility that will go through and compile the pages for you on local or remote servers. I also have information on my page about how to force tomcat to keep compiled pages so that you don't have to recompile on every jboss restart or on every re-deploy of your webapp.

http://dcowan.com/dev/prejsp/