To use a Threading Class for EJBs or not?

Question

I was wondering if someone can help me answer this question? I am going to have this class that will be used by the Beans to complete a transaction. Because I have several Beans that all need this one particular class to complete a transaction, I was wondering if it would be good to create this class in a cache type manner. Meaning this class will only be instantiated once when the server loads after that all the beans will only reference it through this class' getInstance() method. I know this class does not contain any data that needs to persist however I would like to avoid having mulitple instances of this one particular class. The class completes a rather long transaction process. It is not much from my side, but I have to wait a few seconds for the other application that I connect to, to complete the transaction, then finally get a return. This class does not do too much work, but it just needs to wait for a long time to get back a response. Since threads are lighter and cheaper than a complete process I was wondering if I should create this class that extends the thread. Below I have some basic code that can do this but I was wondering if this would be a good methodolgy for transaction heavy application. Sorry for making it too long. I have marked the class with X's to prevent the client who we connect to.
public class XXXXXXX extends Thread {
private static XXXXXXXX wconn = null;
private XXXXXXXX xxc;
private String response = null;
public XXXXXXXX() {
this.xxc = new XXXXXXXX ();
* set properties *
this.xxc.host = ""; //Connector ID
this.xxc.port = 8800; //without SSL
//this.xxc.port = 443; //SSL
this.xxc.ssl = false; //SSL (if true, change port to 443!)
this.xxc.compress = true; //compression
this.xxc._native = true; // native request; MUST set to true for XML Pro
this.xxc.keepalive = false; //indicates if the connection to the server should persist
public void run()
public static XXXXXXXX getInstance()
return wconn;
private other functions ....
Thank You for any insight that you can provide.

Answer 1

So you want to run something outside the containter. It doesn't matter whether you have a seperate app or just run inside the same JVM as the container. Once you are outside the container it doesn't matter how you implement it in terms of J2EE.
It sounds to me like you just have a job and you are submitting that job for processing. You might want to examine what happens when more than one thread accesses that instance at the same time but other than that it works. You might also want to look at what happens if one or more of the other systems are down (where persisting the job on your side might make sense.)