hi everyone,
how hard is adding a basic web services interface to an existing java server application without having to turn it into a .war, or embedding a small web server like jetty?
say, xml-rpc instead of more modern approaches, if it helps.
if not too hard, can you suggest a starting point?
thank you in advance :)
Spring-WS has the facility for using JRE 1.6's embedded web server, if that's an option for you. Spring-WS gives you a very nice SOAP server layer, if that's what you're after.
If not, then an embedded Jetty instance is probably the best idea.
It sounds like you're asking for the impossible: expose an HTTP service without plugging into or embedding an HTTP server!
Unless you want to reimplement what Jetty already does, I'd reccommend using Jetty as a library. That way you don't need to conform to the more awkward aspects of the Servlet spec. E.g. your servlets can have real constructors with parameters.
There is also a simple HTTP server implementation in JDK 6, but it's in the com.sun namespace so I'd avoid it for production code.
Check out the Restlet API which provides a painless way to implement RESTful web services that can run inside a web container or standalone.
Apache has an implementation of XML-RPC at http://ws.apache.org/xmlrpc/server.html. If you look at the examples at that link you will see it is rather easy to integrate into an existing server application.