How should jPOS be configured/used in a prod envir

At my current company we are considering using jPOS to do our ISO 8583 integration with other systems. I've been reading the free documentation for a while, but I still have a lot of gaps. For instance:

How is jPOS supposed to work in prod? Should I just start a Q2 server and it would act like and endpoint receiving or sending ISO8583 messages? How am I suppose to integrate that with my application server?
In which cases and how should I use the jPOS Space?
My basic use case is send/receive ISO messages. Do I need all of that stuff?
Are there any other references out there or examples of this basic system that receives ISO 8583 messages, do some stuff and then replies in ISO8583 messages?

Thank you,

How is jPOS supposed to work in prod? Should I just start a Q2 server and it would act like and endpoint receiving or sending ISO8583 messages?

Yes, that's the preferred way.

How am I suppose to integrate that with my application server?

If your application server is based on OSGi, you can start Q2 as an OSGi bundle. Otherwise, you can just instantiate Q2 from your code and start it, i.e.:

Q2 q2 = new Q2("/path/to/your/deploy");
q2.start();

There's a good detailed thread on how to run jPOS as a JBoss SAR here: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/jpos-users/Ro5wLB7qwKw - could be used as a reference for other app servers.

In which cases and how should I use the jPOS Space?

You don't have to, unless you find it useful. jPOS uses the spaces internally for inter-service communications.

Are there any other references out there or examples of this basic system that receives ISO 8583 messages, do some stuff and then replies in ISO8583 messages?

You may want to try the 'clientsimulator' and 'serversimulator' examples from the jPOS-EE project. You can find the documentation for those here: http://jpos.org/doc/jPOS-EE.pdf

You can find jPOS-EE here: http://github.com/jpos/jPOS-EE