This is probably a naive question, but it's an important one. I'm trying to take an existing app and turn it into a web service. The application has a GUI and needs to maintain state between invocations. I know that stateful EJB's can maintain state, but I don't want to turn this into an EJB - web services should handle the remote aspects of this. I also need to display a GUI persistently between invocations, and I haven't succeded in gettting the GUI to even appear from within the implementation service. What I'm preparing to do is have a thin web service make a socket call on the back end to the actual application. This would solve my problem (assuming there's no constraint on socket communications by Axis); but I lose the advantage of standardized wsdls if I do this, and add another remote link. I'm unclear on how to proceed. Any thoughts on this would be much appreciated.

Try AJAX ..

Hi, What you can try is that from your java client (assuming you have a standalone client) you can set the stub property jaxrpcStub._setProperty(javax.xml.rpc.Stub.SESSION_MAINTAIN_PROPERTY, Boolean.TRUE); Also on server side you can try using this Implement a serviceLifeCycle Interface..in the init method you can initialize the ServletEndpointContext. This object provides you a handle to the servlet session... Now you can just use this to do your work and make the WS stateful Hope this helps Rgds Shashank