>Is there an object I can get access to, that will run once at >initialization (say, the first request ever) and once at server >shutdown?
I don't know that Axis has anything like this. You can do it yourself, though, by creating a new Servlet in your webapp container and hooking the init() and destroy() methods yourself. >I need to open and close a database connection (to a BerkeleyDB JE) in >my Web service. I don't want every request to open and close the >database environment, because most likely I'll run into synchronization >problems (one thread might close some other's database). I don't know anything about your database, but are you sure it's safe for multiple threads to use the single connection? I doubt it. The usual approach is to use a connection pool to get connections. Another option is to create a database connection in a Handler in your Axis request chain.
