Accessing config information in XML file in a Weblogic web service (JWS)

Question

Problem:
I have implemented a web service for sending emails and pages via Java Mail and SNPP respectively using WebLogic Workshop on the BEA WebLogic 8.1 platform. In the service, I use certain pieces of information that are currently stored in an XML file on disk. Also, in its current state, the web service is implemented with public methods directly in the .jws Java file and not as a session bean. The file read from disk is performed every time the web service operation to send a message is invoked. As we all know, the I/O files access is very expensive and a performance bottleneck, especially when it is incurred on every invocation of the web service ‘sendMessage’ [operation.
Without radically re-writing the application, I am looking for a way to improve the performance of the web service and can only come up with the following 2 ways:
1) Move the code out of the sendMessage operation: Here, the main question I have is 'to where should I move it to'? I have seen in the WebLogic Workshop documentation that WebLogic Server maintains only a single instance of a Java class that implements a Web Service operation, and each invoke of the Web Service uses this same instance. In that case, I should be able to put the code in the constructor so that the files is read only at the time the class is instantiated, but a constructor in the .jws file that contains the web service operations itself does not seem to be invoked by the container (I tried to put a breakpoint in the constructor, but it seems that the constructor code never gets called)
2) Move the configuration variables into some type of standard configuration file of WebLogic, something like web.xml or wlw-config.xml or jws-config.properties files. But I found that these XML files have an associated schema to conform to and do not provide any custom elements or attributes that I could add for my application(is that true?). Also, if I can somehow put the configuration information into any of these standard files, how do I access it from within the application 'without' doing a file read from disk? Are these configuration file items available in memory for access and use by the web service and if they are, what API can I use to access and use them?
Any and all ideas are welcome!
Thanks!                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

Answer 1

I have been looking into a similar problem. Since web services are by design stateless, they aren't good for 'remembering' information between calls. Aside from a file read, the only other solution I have found is to use a database. You can make use of an entity bean or simply make some kind of JDBC call. I don't know if you need to stick with the config file, but if so maybe you could read the config data into a database once and then you might have faster access than reading from a file. I'm not sure about which would have better performace, but its all I have come up with so far. What parser are you using to read your XML file? Have you tried others to see if they have better performance?