You don't need to use jboss or any other application  server if you want to use JMS. There are standalone JMS servers like joram & activemq(I recommend if you want to use open source).
But if you realy don't want to use JMS in your project, You may want to simulate the behaviour of JMS. You can persist your requests and then by another thread(s) fulfil them. Your storage simulates JMS queue and the thread(s) should simulate the behaviour of queue readers.