> What surprises me most is that in this internet era, nobody thought of > developing a light weight listener class for listening for HTTP requests. > Java has client side support for posting data to an URL...but then at > server side you better be doing it yourself. I guess notion was you always > need a bulky web server handling this for you, though that is not > necessarily true.
Actually, many, many people have done this. I have worked with organizations where this has been done multiple times for multiple projects, and have myself written small, embedded HTTP servers in Perl, C++ and Java. There are also some examples in books, and I am sure there are several examples on the Internet. Source Forge currently categories 407 projects as HTTP servers (although the descriptions of the projects so categorized that I've looked at mostly do not seem to actually be HTTP servers). Ultimately, I suspect that an HTTP 1.0 server is so simple to write that no one wants to stop there, so they start piling on HTTP 1.1 features, add a servlet container, or something similar. It might be that you could take the source for something like Jetty, strip out the servlet container, and have the embedded HTTP server you want. There are also some not-so-lightweight servers available. W3C's Jigsaw is sort of an HTTP 1.1 reference implementation. Sun's Java Web Server (e.g. http://java.sun.com/pr/1997/june/pr970605-01.html) evolved into both an HTTP server and servlet container, and I believe was ultimately "swept away" in the tidal wave of open source. Scott Nichol -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:soap-dev-unsubscribe@;xml.apache.org> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:soap-dev-help@;xml.apache.org>
