You can easily make your application run as a service on your hosts.
If you have few machines, you can use simple init.d service
To make your built application start as a service, all you need to do is :
sudo link -s /path/to/your/app/yourapp.jar /etc/init.d/yourappservice
And directly after that you can start the yourappservice as you have the service configured
./etc/init.d/yourappservice start
That’t it!
On more complicated environments (many instances, or cloud env) you should probably use supervisor to control your services.
You can check it out here : http://supervisord.org/running.html#adding-a-program