Options For A Common Service in Weblogic

I am working on a weblogic application farm that is hosting a few dozen applications. I would like to build a common application that will do lookups from a database. I need my program to be accessable to the other app开发者_运维问答lications on the farm. So, my question is,

What are my options for getting my data to the other application? Should I make a webservice for them to call, or can I use JNDI. Remember that all the calling applications are on the same box. I am new to this so any advise is welcomed.

I would use EJBs (Stateless Session Beans) instead of web services to avoid the overhead of Object to XML marshalling/unmarshalling for Java to Java interactions (and you could easily expose EJBs as web service later if the need arises).