I have a web service written using JAX-WS. It's deployed as a war file (does that matter? I could change if it does). The @WebService annotated class has some data fields which need one-time initialization.

My first attempt to do this was in the constructor but I soon realised that the constructor is invoked every time a service method is invoked (twice actually). So I started reading and the @PostConstruct annotation seems to do what I want. However my method annotated with @PostConstruct is never called (it's a public void method with no parameters).

What's the right method to do this? And why does @PostConstruct not seem to work?

Thanks