I m writing a Java application that will run for a long time (essentially, it stays running between system restarts) and does a fair bit of intensive near real-time data processing. Data is delivered to the application, some work is done on that data, and it s then passed on for delivery.
I need to provide a way to inspect the inner workings of the application at runtime. I ve already got a fairly well established but hand-carved telnet style interface that allows you to use a command line to ask questions about statistics, data queues, etc, but I d like to move that to HTTP as I think it will allow me to provide a much richer picture of what s going on (showing load graphs, etc).
Are there any established Java frameworks that allow me to embed a web server and handle requests in a reasonable way? I don t really want to have to hand-carve a whole lot of HTML handling and response generation as it s just annoying background noise to the essence of what I need.