I have used the Java Service Wrapper from Tanuki Software at a past job and it worked really well for us. The main things we used it for were the controls scripts, JVM monitoring and triggered restarts and thread dumps. You can take a look at the full list of features.

In modern applications these could be partially covered by other tools such as build/packaging tools which can generate service and controls scripts, logs and metrics aggregation services, and health checks in automatic restarts in container engines. Making your application more resilient can also alleviate a lot of the issues.

That being said I still think it can be handy to have if you have an application which doesn't handle failures gracefully and needs a restart when it gets into a funny state.

I'm personally on the hunt to see what alternatives there are to reign in a troublesome monolith that I have inherited.

rather than extending WrapperSimpleApp, your main class should implement the org.tanukisoftware.wrapper.WrapperListener interface.

You can find a very detailed description about implementing the interface on our website: http://wrapper.tanukisoftware.com/doc/english/integrate-listener.html

Please let me know if you have any further questions about the implementation and/or the configuration properties in your conf file.

Another advise which comes in handy for me sometimes, is rather than running your application immediately as service, I find it easier to do the integration by running first as console application, because you can see the output directly on your console. Once everything seems working, I go ahead and install/run as service. To run as console application, you would run for example:

C:\servicetest\bin>wrapper -c ../conf/wrapper.conf

You can also turn on debug output for the Wrapper by setting

wrapper.debug=true

in your conf file.

Edit due to the comment:

if your application is actually as simple as you describe, then just write your application as normal Java application without any Wrapper API parts.

You can use the WrapperSimpleApp to run your application out of the box with codeless integration into the Wrapper.

All you need to do is set the following properties in your conf file:

wrapper.java.mainclass=org.tanukisoftware.wrapper.WrapperSimpleApp
wrapper.app.parameter.1=textappender.Main
wrapper.java.classpath.1=../lib/wrapper.jar
wrapper.java.classpath.2=../MyProject.jar

With this configuration, the Wrapper will be able to run your application as windows service.

UPDATE2

I'm not sure what your code exactly looks like, but it seems you are calling WrapperManager.stop() in your main class...

Following the initial example class, I have modified the class, so it is not using any Wrapper-API (which for an simple application is not necessary):

public class Main {    
public static void main(String[] args) {
    while(true) {
        Logger.getLogger(Main.class.getName()).log(Level.INFO, "I'm alive");
        try 
        { Thread.sleep(2000); } 
        catch (java.lang.InterruptedException ex) 
        { return; }
    }
}
}

After compile and creating the jar, the necessary properties in the conf file are:

wrapper.java.mainclass=org.tanukisoftware.wrapper.WrapperSimpleApp
wrapper.app.parameter.1=textappender.Main
wrapper.java.classpath.1=../lib/wrapper.jar
wrapper.java.classpath.2=../MyProject.jar

cheers,