All I want to do is create a java application that executes and performs server side polling on a turn based game after authentication to an address space(java web hosting service).I'm a couple years away from writing web applications that ran through a remote server, but leveraged my local tomcat server to perform the server side logic. 

First question, can tomcat/glassfish be used to generate non-web based applications?

Secondly.That being said, is it sufficient to simply use glassfish/tomcat to connect to a java-web hosting service(address space)? And is a web-hosting service simply an address space that runs java application code?

Regards,

CE

There exist many different web hosting setups. You need to have a better description of what a "web hosting space" is for whatever host you're using.

There's nothing in Java preventing a Tomcat or Glassfish service from spawning a thread, calling bind() / listen() / accept() and running whatever protocol you want. However, wherever that Tomcat is running might have other requirements on processes that will make that not actually work the way you want.

I'm gonna do some research and find a better way to ask this because apparently I'm not putting the right words together.