Object question

[Mark de Lange]

Hi,   I'm trying to build an e-commerce system, with the server-side written in Java (using Servlets). It's completely OO, so customers, products and shopping-baskets are objects instead of data in a relational database.   The problem is that I don't know where to run the customer, basket and product objects. One possibility is to run them in de Java Virtual Machine of the HTTP-server. But how can I create and manage these objects without using a servlet? For example, when the HTTP-server starts, I want to create the product-instances to build the initial product-catalog.   Another way is to run these objects in a Java application and let the servlets communicate with this application using RMI, but I expect performance problems using this method.   Does anyone have a suggestion?    Thanks,   Mark de Lange