Spring's application context prevents other applications from starting in same servlet container

Question

I have two web applications running in same Servlet container (Tomcat), A and B. These two connect to each other using Spring Remoting. On startup, B needs to call A to open a connection automatically, it's basically a really simple authentication call.

However since B is (in my case) loaded before A, B's application context blocks until the entire application is started up. What this means is that the B application will be stuck until timeouts etc. occur and only then A is allowed to start, however at this point B is now incapable of connecting to A and the required connection between two web applications won't be created.

So, how do I work around this? I'm currently hooking the connection command using InitializingBean and the application context is initialized using a listener.

Answer 1

Two options come to my mind:

• Run two instances of Tomcat, on different ports.
• perform the authentication in a new thread (preferably using an ExecutorService). Thus the "main" thread won't block and the deployment will continue.