I would like to initialize my local data store with some data using a
regular Java program (I do not want to start the Development Server
and call a service/servlet), and I\
Google provides a helper class that does exactly what you want - runs just enough code to work with the database, without launching the whole dev server. See the setUp and tearDown methods at http://code.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/localunittesting.html