A little note, not sure if it is something I did or maven did:
When I ran mvn clean install (config dir ...) it failed to delete the catalog.xml and services.xml files in my web\src\main\webapp\WEB-INF directory. This was causing an old catalog.xml file to be used (hence the broken war file looking for alaska.shp).
It doesn't seem to be repopulated any more that I have deleted it and re-run the build, so I think something changed in the maven build config so that it no longer populates that directory with the catalog information. So just as a tip, if you have a catalog.xml and services.xml file in your web\src\main\webapp\WEB-INF directory, delete them so they don't come back and haunt you.
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Brent Owens
(The Open Planning Project)