Question

I want to write a simple P2P test app which uses HTTP as underlying protocol.
The app has to decide on demand, if it should act as a HTTP server, or as a HTTP client.

The classic way which I am aware of, would be to deploy the app on some existing HTTP server. But this is the wrong way for my intention. It has to be the other way: the server is started by the app (and only if it decides to).

Is there a way to execute the HTTP server part on demand (without deploying the app itself on a server)?

Can I do it by linking Glassfish or Tomcat libraries and call some ‘main’ method?

Edit: IT WORKS!!!
I now tried Jetty along with JAX-RS (Jersey) successfully!
Thank you all.

(the REST class is trivial and left out)

package my.p2p;

import com.sun.jersey.spi.container.servlet.*; import org.mortbay.jetty.*; import org.mortbay.jetty.servlet.*;  public class Main {   public static void main(String[] args)       throws Exception {      ServletHolder holder = new ServletHolder(ServletContainer.class);      holder.setInitParameter('com.sun.jersey.config.property.resourceConfigClass',       'com.sun.jersey.api.core.PackagesResourceConfig');     holder.setInitParameter('com.sun.jersey.config.property.packages', 'my.p2p.rest');      Server server = new Server(8000);      Context context = new Context(server, '/', Context.SESSIONS);     context.addServlet(holder, '/*');     server.start();   } } 

Answer 1

You may use Jetty or some other embeddable HTTP server. From Jetty’s web site:

Jetty is an open-source project providing a HTTP server, HTTP client and javax.servlet container. These 100% java components are full-featured, standards based, small foot print, embeddable, asynchronous and enterprise scalable. Jetty is dual licensed under the Apache License 2.0 and/or Eclipse Public License 1.0. Jetty is free for commercial use and distribution under the terms of either of those licenses.