The NanoSparqlServer provides a simple embedded REST API [1] for SPARQL Query and RDF data management. It is available either as an embedded server (using jetty) or as a bigdata WAR. The embedded server can be trivially started from the command line and we use it all the time for benchmarking, unit tests, etc. The WAR is nearly as easy to deploy. Drop it into your favorite servlet container (tomcat, etc.), edit web.xml and RWStore.properties and off you go. See [1] for details on the REST API and the different ways that you can deploy the NanoSparqlServer.
You can still deploy bigdata inside of a Sesame WAR [2], but we have always found this cumbersome to setup. The NanoSparqlServer is much easier to deploy than the Sesame WAR and works equally well in front of a Journal (simple persistence store scalable to 10B+ triples) or a BigdataFederation (clustered database). We’ll be adding a bigdata administration console to the webapp shortly.
Have fun.