So far, it works!!
I have a super simple Main.java app that includes the one .jar file linked by bnevins and uses the code snippet linked by jc129909. This does exactly what I wanted: I can embed a light-weight, fast-startup server that can host content from a regular directory including both static resources (html, images, etc) as well as .jsp files.
Fantastic!!! Thanks so much guys. This embeddable mode is a big deal for me.
One minor gripe (I think this is a defect): server.stop() doesn't seem to work. If I write a super-trivial Main.java with just the following code snippet wrapped in a "main" method, the server will never properly shut down, because the server threads are still running
EmbeddedInfo info = new EmbeddedInfo();
info.setServerName("server");
info.setHttpPort(8080);
Server server = new Server(info);
server.start();
server.stop();
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