At my project it is necessary to ensure that each client can also become a HTTP server on their own so that they can communicate with other clients.
One would think that this task would be easier using JMS or any other communication protocols like XMPP.
However, I'm assuming a worst case scenario where the proxy for a LAN only allows connections from port 80 to the outside world and even then, checks all packages to ensure that the content of each message is real HTTP content.
I'm also assuming that the users of the client have no administrative permissions and no power to allow ports to be open or controlled by applications with guest permissions.
So, port 80 is a nice way to communicate since LAN proxies often let this door open but we still can't move past the administrative permissions required to control port 80 so I'm using for the moment 8080 as an alternative.
I've considered several communication protocols over the past two weeks, I've lost so much time looking around that I became a bit disappointed at some time. Much of what you find in Java nowadays is targeted to enterprise applications and there are good reasons why whenever someone refers to "enterprise" it might just seems like another synonym for "slow", "fat" and "octopus" to come in mind.
Let's try to change this picture then.
As HTTP server, I've abandoned the option of JMS and went forward onto plain HTTP interpretation back and forth of HTML messages (possibly marshaled with XML instructions).
Looking for HTTP servers, I've discovered that Java 6 comes already built-in with an HTTP server (link), however, we can only use Java 5 as the minimum supported java so I went looking for other projects. Found quite many of them but my favorite was this one: nanoHTTPD.
It is self-contained inside a single Java file (sized in 24kb) and brings all the basic support for exchanging pages back and forth.
As a wishful thinking, it would be nice to use the servlet power since the application is intended to be flexible and allows plugins to be integrated but I'm running out of time and other priorities need to be meet on time.
Nevertheless, here is a list of other small sized web servers in plain java that you might be interested in taking a look:
Jibble - http://www.jibble.org/jibblewebserver.php (small sized)
WikiWebServer - http://www.wikiwebserver.org (user editable)
TJWs - http://tjws.sourceforge.net (requires 7beee dependency to build)
WinStone - http://winstone.sourceforge.net (Servlet, looks professional, multiple hosts, lite version is 170Kb)
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