Creating threads in Weblogic

Question

For a variety of reasons I need to write my own messaging bridge between Weblogic and MQ. The reasons have been validated by BEA, so I'm not completely off my rocker :)
I can either write this as a standalone java application that acts as a client to weblogic's JMS server, or as a deployed webapp (using the ServletContextListener method to start/stop it). Either way the app will <shudder>create one thread per queue</shudder> and listen on that queue until a message arrives.
The pros of a deployed application (cost-free clustering, management, can use a webapp to manage the threads/queues, etc) leads me in that direction, but creating threads in a J2EE server dubious at best.
Ideally this webapp runs in its own execute queue, and the holy grail is to have the threads run in that execute queue. However, there doesn't seem to be any supported way to create threads from an execute queue.
Has anyone done anything like this? Any suggestions on how to spawn and manage the threads properly? Should it be deployed or stand-alone?
cheers
mike

Answer 1

Hello,
The webapp route sounds better to me than a standalone java app, you will get things up and running a lot more quickly and get all the goodies associated with webapps.
You don't explicity create threads from the queue for example in the way you get connections from a connection pool. Once you have created and configuered your execute queue you just add a few init parameters to your web.xml deployment descriptor:
<servlet>
<servlet-name>MainServlet</servlet-name>
<jsp-file>/myapplication/critical.jsp</jsp-file>
<init-param>
<param-name>wl-dispatch-policy</param-name>
<param-value>CriticalAppQueue</param-value>
</init-param>
</servlet>
see:
http://e-docs.bea.com/wls/docs81/perform/AppTuning.html#1105201
for complete instructions.
cheers
Hussein Badakhchani
www.orbism.com