tomcat instalation macintosh begginer

[kalimba]

I am not an experienced programmer but I used to use ASP quite a bit to automate some things on my web site. I wanted to learn about JSP pages and experiment on my machine with it a bit. So I understand I need to install tomcat to do this. i followed instructions on various websites and eventually got to what i thought was a successful instal.

I got the following lines in the terminal window:
Using CATALINA_BASE: /usr/local/tomcat
Using CATALINA_HOME: /usr/local/tomcat
Using CATALINA_TMPDIR: /usr/local/tomcat/temp
Using JRE_HOME: /usr/local/bin/java

this time with no error messages.
However everytime I open

http://localhost:8080

I recieve the following message:

Safari can't connect to the server
Safari can’t open the page “

http://localhost:8080/”

because it could not connect to the server “localhost”.

However if i just open

http://localhost

i get the apache "successful instal page"

I have tried various versions of tomcat, I have tried turning off my firewall, unplugging from the internet...I have no idea. If anyone knows what I should do please let me know.

Thanks in advance.