How to handle long running Processes in J2EE

Question

Hi all,
we want to design something like a process engine on our application server. It should be possible to start processes asynchronous, so we think what we need is a message driven bean to start processes.
The problem is that there are different states while running the process and it should be possibe to request the current state at the running process. But how we get access to the process after its once started over the stateless message driven bean?
I hope you can understand the problem and maybe have a solution.
Thanks & regards
Rene G.

Answer 1

You are totally right, but i think my problem is not to design a good software application, my problem is to design this in j2ee. I have not so much j2ee experience in this way. Normally to solve this problem i would think about something like a container which contains one thread for each process. But i read that it is forbidden in j2ee to have your own thread management, so this seems to be a bad solution in j2ee, not at all.
I hope you understand me a little better now and i hope you don't think that i only want to utilize your knowledge to have less work by myself. I think this is a kind of j2ee specific question, which can be ask in a forum like this, isn't it?
Thanks & regards
Rene G.