Re: Application Scoped Object in Web Service

I'm an experienced C# dev working on a new project in Java (haven't
touched it since college) and was wondering if I could get some input
on my design. I have a search engine object that will take a non-
trivial amount of time to instantiate and that I need to be exposed
via a web service - it will be a singleton, so that every web service
request will be serviced by it rather than having the overhead of
instantiating a new search engine object with each call.

In C#, I would typically create a Windows service backend that would
host the singleton object and then hook the web service up via .NET
remoting over a TCP binary channel. This has worked great in the past,
but being new to Java I was wondering if there is a better solution to
my problem available in this camp. In Java, I am currently building a
backend service/daemon that will host the singleton and expose it to
the web service via RMI... basically the same pattern with different
libraries.

I've come across mentions of Application-Scoped objects in Axis web
services, could I utilize this for my singleton object and do away
with the service/daemon backend application completely? What are the
pros and cons to doing this? Is it reasonable to host a java
application like this within a webserver process? This is production
code that will be shrinkwrapped and shipped, so it has to work well
and reliably.