creating spring rest services without using spring boot

I've followed the Getting Started tutorial on spring.io for building REEST services http://ift.tt/1gbU6WI. The problem is that this tutorial only explain how to produce a standalone running jar with tomcat embedded using spring boot.

Is there a way to create a project from scratch to produce a war to deploy for instance on an already existing tomcat instance?

PS: I had found a previous thread Spring RESTful Service as a WAR instead of JAR in Tomcat on stackoverflow concerning the very same issue. The problem is that the accepted answers and suggestions doesn't exactly solve my problem, since I'm not looking for ways to modify the standalone-app spring boot project so that it works on an external tomcat container, but would like to find a 'cleaner' solution not involving spring boot at all. (I'm not exactly sure how to behave here, being still quite new at stackoverflow. I hope that opening a new question is the correct procedure).