Choices in Deploying Spring Contexts

[BinaryTweedDeej]

Hi all,

I'm considering various options for deploying Spring contexts to a multitude of dynamically-provisioned cloud-based servers. I'd really like to avoid having to rely on anything like Debian packages to get my .jars/.wars where they need to go.

Using a Servlet container is a great way of installing an application on a server somewhere, without having to worry about making .jars executable, and setting up OS services to run them. However if one isn't using HTTP, it seems a bit strange to be deploying Spring contexts to a Servlet container without any Servlets!

What options are there for getting Java applications with Spring contexts in out to servers? Is there anything other than:

1. Deploying .wars to a Servlet container;
2. Deploying executable .jars to a server, and setting up the OS to start them as a service?

[bytor99999]

Doesn't Heroku allow you deploy applications that are just jar files?

Mark