My webservices consists of apache axis and a bean (non ejb) that
advertises one method as
a webservice.

Is a new class created for every thread that access the webservice? If
so this would mean
that class variables would be thread safe?
Or does it behave more like a servlet where multiple threads share a
single instance of the servlet and the methods and local variables
within the methods are assigned per thread memory alocation ?

How would I access application based varaibles within my webservice
class? For example I need a enviroment variable that is checked by the
webservice class. Currently I use the jndi and pull it from the
context.xml file. This requires every instance of the class to get this
information.
For example using the PageContext or ConfigContext within my bean to
retrieve startup variables from the container and then store them.

thx jason