Deploying a Web Service w/o WAR files

Question

I've seen several posts on this (including a few from me about a year ago), but I haven't seen anything from Sun on how to do this.
In JWSDP 1.1 xrpcc would create a *Config.properties file, and I would add the following to my web.xml file
                     <servlet>
          <servlet-name>API</servlet-name>
          <servlet-class>com.sun.xml.rpc.server.http.JAXRPCServlet</servlet-class>
          <init-param>
             <param-name>configuration.file</param-name>
             <param-value>/WEB-INF/APIService_Config.properties</param-value>
          </init-param>
          <load-on-startup>0</load-on-startup>
     </servlet>
   <servlet-mapping>
      <servlet-name>API</servlet-name>
      <url-pattern>/api/*</url-pattern>
   </servlet-mapping>The xrpcc tool would create all my stubs, and it would create the *Config.properties file referenced in the web.xml. I could bundle these with my other classes, and everything would work. Very nice.
JWSDP 1.2 introduced wscompile/wsdeploy. These tools started requiring WARs (which SUCKS for large projects during development, btw. PLEASE ADD OTHER OPTIONS, SUN!!!!!).
wscompile also quit creating the Config.properties file. However, I was able to keep my old build process working by holding onto the Config.properties files from 1.1 and using the same web.xml definition.
My questions are:
1. What tool generates this *Config.properties file? How can I get back to this?
2. Is the configuraiton I'm using optimal for use with 1.2 (I haven't even looked at 1.3 yet)?
3. Does anyone else build/deploy not using WAR files?!? Do you have any ideas/suggestions/experience that might be helpful.

Answer 1

I dont know if this will help, but I also use a config.properties to load my servlet values and also using JWSDP 1.2 .
I manually create the config file ( since i know what values to expect )
I run wscompile/wsdeploy over my files to create the war file containing tie + wsdl + utility classes
This is then extracted to a temp directory .
Here I maually edit my web.xml and copy the config file across to WEB_INF directory .
Note that the wsdl file has to be in the same directory as the WEB-INF....
This may sound quite long winded to do , but works fine for me ..