Accessing EJBs from user created thread

[tobe]

Hi,

I'm migrating to Spring and have lots of old EJBs that still needs to be EJBs. For several reasons, I really need the calls to the EJB to be asynchronous, but I find no way to do it.

The call originally comes from the web container (hessian web service), and I have been trying to use TaskExecutor, normal Threads etc, but the container (OC4J) complains that the thread is in a non application context of course.

How can I spawn off threads in Spring that are in the correct (EJB?) context? Or maybe there is a way to have a servlet return immediately?

Best regards
Torbjörn

[fcracker79]

In general,
it's a good practice to use jms if you want to do asynchronous activities.
This means that:
1. Your servlet sends a message in a queue
2. A Message Driven Bean intercepts the message and, based on its content, may invoke the correct EJB

Another (and probably more scalable) solution may be creating a queue for each session bean, and hence, an mdb for each one.
In order to try both the solutions, I suggest you to implement a service locator on the web tier.
Anyway, you have to cope with eventual return value, which should be persisted somewhere.