Background tasks in Axis2 - Tomcat stack

Question

I am working on a Java server side application that needs to provide a SOAP service. For this, we are using Axis2 and deploy in a Tomcat 6 installation.

We have the following issue: we need to run a couple of background threads; one to periodically query another web service for changes in provided data and a second one to monitor and consume data in an MQ.

My question is, what is the best, Java EE, practice to run these background tasks? Should we just run those as background threads that we'll somehow need to tell Tomcat to run at startup? Is there a better way than spawning threads from the web app container?

The system is not large enough to argue breaking it to smaller parts (e.g. run the background tasks in a system deamon with the webservice part being a separate stateless component querying that system deamon). For the same reason we do not have the option to run within a full app server like JBoss (would that make any difference?).

Thanks!

UPDATE: On a supplementary question, if we just spawned new threads for these tasks (and assuming that this is not common practice), would Tomcat (or Axis) be made more unstable or have any other issues?

Answer 1

I would suggest to use quartz-scheduler for such kind of things. It's simpler than to threads itself and of course more flexible to use. There are interceptors during the start of Tomcat or Axis2 so you can start the scheduler there.