Is Java Dying?

I'm trying to find an RPC protocol (xmlrpc, json, soap, rest, etc.) and server-side implementation for Java that doesn't depend on the massively over-grown and unmanageable train wreck which is J2EE.

And I'm not saying that J2EE shouldn't exist (although that thought does make me smile); I just wish it wouldn't infect everything.

So, there's ws-xmlrpc, but its developers state:

Use of the WebServer has grown very popular amongst users of Apache XML-RPC. Why this is the case, can hardly be explained, because the WebServer is at best a workaround [...]. For example, under heavy load it will almost definitely be slower than a real servlet engine, because it does neither support proper keepalive (multiple requests per physical connection) nor chunked mode (in other words, it cannot stream requests).

The description continues in broken English with similarly flattering things. Anyway, this WebServer is their idea of an alternative to running it from within a J2EE application server. WHY WebServer is popular (despite its ENORMOUS short-comings) seems obvious: people don't want to use a system based on tens of millions of lines of code just to send some xml back and forth.

What a novel notion.

It if weren't for Objective-C, I would have long since dusted off my C++ books. I may still.