Java EE (Java Enterprise Edition) General Discussion

Hey all,

I am helping a friend set up a test framework, and I've turned him on to using JEE6 for the task. I am decently familiar with entity beans, session beans, and such. One of the new features is @Asynchronous, allowing a method to be ran on a separate thread. The test framework generally needs to spawn potentially 1000's of threads to simulate multiple users at once. Originally I was doing this using the Executor classes, but I've since learned that for some reason, spawning your own threads within a JEE container is "not allowed" or bad to do. I honestly don't quite know why this is.. from what I've read the main concern is that the container maintains threads and your own threads could mess up the container somehow. I can only guess that this might be possible if your threads use the container services in some way.. but if anyone could enlighten me on the details as to why this is bad, that would be great.

None the less, EJB 3.1 adds the async capability and I am now looking to use this. From my servlet I use @EJB to access the session bean, and call an async method. My servlet returns right away as it should. From the async method I do some work and using an entity bean store results, so I don't need to return a Future object. In fact, my ejb then makes an HttpClient call to another servlet to notify it that the result is ready.

My main question though, is if it's ok to call other methods from the async method that are not declared @Asynchronous. I presume it is ok, as the @Asynchronous just enables the container to spawn a thread to execute that method in. But I can't dig up any limitations on the code within an async method.. whether or not it has restrictions on the container services, is there anything wrong with using HttpClient to make a request from the method.. and making calls to helper methods within the bean that are not async.

Thanks.