Lightweight approach for providing a simple web-based interface to a Java class, minimizing startup overhead?

I've been looking for a way to provide a simple web-based interface for a Java class. I guess one way to use one of the lightweight Java-based servers to frontend this Java class, but there's a twist to my situation.

The thing is that this class has quite a large startup overhead, because when it starts up, it pulls a bunch of information from a remote database.

Because of this, it would not be practical to instantiate the class for each request.

So I was wondering what kind of design would make sense for this type of situation?

Thanks, Jim