How to run background process with web application

Question

Hi,
I have a web application , a servlet. I would like to have a background process that collecting data for my servlet.
How can I achieve this? can someone point me to a tutorial or example?
Also, would it be possible to share an object between the background process and myservlet?
Thanks,

Answer 1

Thanks for the idea.
I had the background process running. :)
But I'm still do not understand this part to share an object such as Java Map (<id,myobject>), what do you mean by "task a property of my ServletContextListener" ?
BalusC wrote:
If you make the task a property of your ServletContextListener implementation and put the implementation in the application scope, then you can access it from any servlet.Do you mind explain to me a bit more I'm still fairly new with this or maybe if you know an example.
Here's my code snippet so far. How can I share myList to MyServlet?
public class MonitorTimer extends TimerTask
       private Map<String, Channel> myList;
     @Override
     public void run()
          System.out.println("Monitor Timer times up");
          //Clear the map before fill with the new data
          if(myList!= null)
               myList.clear();
          loadConfig();
        private void getData()
           //fill myList with data
public class MyContextListener implements ServletContextListener
     @Override
     public void contextDestroyed(ServletContextEvent arg0)
          // TODO Auto-generated method stub
     @Override
     public void contextInitialized(ServletContextEvent arg0)
          System.out.println("Context Initialized");
          Timer timer = new Timer();
          //Run MonitorTimer every 2 minutes
          timer.scheduleAtFixedRate(new MonitorTimer(), 10*1000,2*60*1000);
public class MyServlet extends HttpServlet implements Servlet
     @Override
     public void destroy()
          // TODO Auto-generated method stub
          super.destroy();
     @Override
     protected void doGet(HttpServletRequest request, HttpServletResponse response)
               throws ServletException, IOException
}Thank you so much for your help,
Edited by: geek.shrek on Nov 4, 2009 1:50 PM