Rick,
> > > > Web applications should NEVER fork processes or create their own
> threads.
> > > > You can see on the J2EE specs that Servlets and EJBs are
> expressly
> > > > prohibited from doing this.
> > >
> > > Is this true? I know lots of servelet developers (mostly using Tomcat)
> that
> > > do this all the time without encountering any problems.
>
> I realize that. That is why I asked the question. I'm just saying that
> when I hear people that I trust tell me that it is a common accepted
> practice and then I hear someone else tell me otherwise I'm not just going
> to take either side's opinion. Seeing the spec however would be nice
> because next time I discuss it witha Java developer I could back up what I
> was saying.
I'll also review this at the first oportunity. :-)
> > I can't imagine how a web server cannot be affected by apps creating
> threads
> > and/or proccesses. Think about memmory use, resource pooling,
> syncronization
> > issues, ...
>
> That fact that I know that this is being done regularly on widely deployed
> entrprise wide applications for very, very large companies without even a
> hint of a problem makes me think that your perception of the issue may be
> slightly flawed. If you can't imagine how this would ever not cause huge
> problems then I think you just might be missing something.
Maybe I am simply wrong. Maybe Tomcat was build to handle this (but I saw many
reports on scalability issues on J2EE regarding threads). Maybe your friends
are dawn good programmers able to make dangerous things work flawlessly. :-)
Or maybe they actually don't create so much new threads, compared to the server
threads that handle http requests.
[]s, Fernando Lozano