Newbie merlin/http question

Hi All,
   I have a couple of question regarding merlin I hope some people here 
will be able to help me with. I working on project involving 2 way text 
messaging. It goes like this, a user sends a text message to a 
particular number and the mobile phone company routes the message to 
our SMS Server/Gateway. The SMS server can then pass on the message to 
web server in the form of an HTTP POST request. The POST request is 
sent as xml encoded as form data contained in the "xml" parameter. It's 
left to me to parse the XML data using an SDK provided by the SMS 
gatewat vendor. My question is this, does merlin have any type of 
built-in servlet engine that can handle the HTTP POST request made by 
the SMS server. Although I'm not a web application guru, I was able to 
accomplish this with tomcat and also Apache/perl CGI scripts. After 
explaining the project to a friend he suggested I take a look at merlin 
because of the applications we are trying to build around the text 
messaging platform. I don't know what merlin's learning curve is like, 
I've done most of my development work in J2SE with very little exposure 
to Enterprise java development, I don't know if J2EE is a prerequisite 
for learning merlin. Any information would be greatly appreciated. 
Thanks in advance.

--idris