Running Java apps as Windows Services

A tricky little problem, as it turns out. There is little out in google world to help you, and only a few tools. License issues with almost all I found, especially running on Windows boxes in 64 bit mode.

 I finally found Yet Another Java Service Wrapper at yajsw. License is LGPL and it supports 64 bit windows. I was able to get my application running very quickly. Worked perfectly the first time. Getting going was interesting:

 1) You download yajsw and extract the zip file.
 2) You run your app and lookup its PID.
3) You run the yajsw script generator, and it analyzes your running application to create a script file.
4) You then run the yajsw bat files to install-service, uninstall-service, start-service, stop-service, etc.

The only trick is to run the bat files with administrator permissions. (Right-click on the bat file and select “Run as administrator”.)

Right now the yajsw folder needs to exist on the server as well. Doubtless there are more convenient ways to package the install, but this was a good first step.