want to run a daemon as soon as the java app gets deployed on dm server

Hi all,

These are my project requirements:

I need to create an application where i need to populate flex based ui client with the data from multiple remote sources over http post. The code to fetch the data from remote sources will be written in Java.

Now I have few design related issues, like if i call these external apis every time based on ui events, it generate lot of data traffic and keeping in mind that it is a web based UI client which will be launched asynchronously, this looks to be a bad design.

So i am thinking of having a daemon or scheduler to run a program as soon as my application gets deployed on the dm server, this is program will be keep polling for the data from external sources and keep storing it into the database. This db will serve as a data store for flex UI. this way i will able to maintain data traffic to limited. is there any better approach to achieve this?