Standalone application

[Alex Chen <al...@sbcglobal.net>]

I am new to SOAP and try to use it as an RPC protocol.
I was looking at the XML-RPC, which seems simple enough to use and
is light-weight.  But the development with ASF seems to have stopped (?)

Apache's AXIS seems to reply on an external web server, unlike Apache's
XML-RPC that has its own.  This makes the application become a web service
and part of the Tomcat runtime environment.  The application will be
passively
waiting for an request to process, i.e. on-demand, but does not run
continuously.

Is there a way to make the application to run by continuously, i.e. JVM
invokes the
main() method of one of its class, but still be able to use SOAP as the RPC
protocol?
Or is that a way to at least make Tomcat spawn a thread to run the
application so
that it can run continuously in the background?

Any help will be appreciated.