More reasons to hate Web Services

Ok. Standards are a great thing. I agree with that much.

Buy why, oh why is it such a pain in the neck to create and deploy simple web services? In Java, it can only (easily) be done by using an application server, which is a tremendous drain on resources. I am investigating SOAPpy (Pythod WS framework) right now, and it seems just as tedious.

If web services are supposed to SIMPLIFY interoperability, why do they have to be so complicated themselves?

Here is my predicament: I have a backend service written using Java that I have created a native protocol for. It works well for me. I would like to expose some of that using web services so that other clients can easily be written. That's all. I don't want to use Tomcat, JBoss, or Websphere to do it (they are all overkill). I don't even care if Java is used or not.

That's all. Thirty minutes of googling indicate I have a lot of work to do if I want to accomplish this.

This is the 21st century, folks. What ever happened to making the easy things simple? Or is this not simple?