I thought you said that you didn't want to get into the chaos of learning Web Services in Java right now?
You know what....you need to take a step back for a second and learn Web Services if it's a requirement in your application.
Just create a simple "Hello World" web service first and then modify it to do other things (like connect to a database).
You're just going to get overwhelmed if you start learning everything at the same time...well, at least I would.
My Java skills are a little rusty but you should probably check out the
javax-jws package. It's used to create web services in Java.
Check out this tutorial on
creating a web service with netbeans (found it on the netbeans site). It explains how to create, deploy, and consume a web service in detail.
Once you have a working web service we can look into connecting it to a database...however, it seems pretty straight forward to me on how to do this (use the jdbc driver to connect to your database, retrieve what you need, and return it...make sure you have the jdbc driver installed on the server).
-Frinny