Help needed: Handling web service requests from a J2SE application

Question

I want to write an J2SE application that is able to receive and parse web service requests. I want the application to, when started, start listen for incoming requests on a specific port.
So far, I have embedded Apache Tomcat and Apache Axis in my application so that they parse the incoming requests and pass them on to my application logic.
This seems like a very cumbersome way of doing it. I have included an almost full J2EE server in my application just to be able to parse web service requests.
Is there an easier way? What technologies could I use? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Thanks for the help!
It seems awfully complex though. Couldn't one just
listen to incoming requests on a socket and use some
good tool to parse them?
Of course you could. One of the projects in that list is a 1 class java file. It could listen for requests, then you could parse the posted SOAP messages using JAXP and pass the requests on to your application. This will require a good understanding of SOAP however, and it may end up taking more time than simply using the JWSDP with a slightly beefier server.
Given that there is only a handful carefully
specified requests that the application needs to be
able to respond to it seems overkill to include a
full servlet enabled server...