I am new to SOAP and try to use it as an RPC protocol. AXIS seems to reply on an external web server, i.e. Tomcat, to the HTTP handling and makes itself a web service. This would make axis and my application part of Tomcat runtime environment, would it not? Does this mean the application will be passively waiting for an request to process, i.e. on-demand, when Tomcat invokes the end point but does not run continuously when the system starts up, or when Tomcat starts?
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 to accept calls from clients within Axis framework? Or is that a way to at least make Tomcat spawn a thread to initialize the application so that it can run continuously in the background, i.e. doing other stuff other than waiting for calls from clients? I do not need detailed instruction on how to do it, although I do not object it either :) I just want to know if this is doable and where I can find more information. Thanks in advance.
