Hola!

The following is my general environment:
JBoss 3.2.3
XDoclet 1.2.1
Struts
MySQL

I'm trying to provide my users with the ability to query various aspects of data that resides behind an EJB layer (I'm using entity beans and stateless session beans.) I've created a session bean class that gets created in an Action class to do the heavy-lifting.

My problem is that some of the noodling through data that needs to be done can take an indeterminate amount of time and I'd like to relegate the task to a background process. I've been thinking of spawning threads from this session bean but don't know if I can keep track of these various threads and even if I have access to other entity beans from the spawned threads.

If anyone knows a better or more acceptable approach to performing background-processing tasks that can get started/stopped by end-users, please respond. Many thanks.