Today I figured how to run a background process from within a web application that utilizes Spring 2.0 or greater. At first, I investigated all sorts of ways of adding multithreading to a web application before stumbling upon this gem.

The key is that Spring provides a class, TaskExecutor, that allows you to run a background task by simply creating a class that implements the Runnable interface and hooking it up to your application with some simple configuration.

In short, as Spring allows Java web developers to program using POJOs and not against a set of interfaces, TaskExecutor and its cohorts allow us to do background processing using simple classes instead of forcing us to handle the ugly details of multithreading and synchronization ourselves.

Thanks, Spring dudes! Once again, you save the day.
See Chapter 23 of the Spring Framework documentation for more information.

I.like(bigButts) && I.canLie(false);
otherBrothers.canDeny(false);
when (girl.walksIn())
{
if (girl.hasIttyBittyWaist() && roundThing.getLocation()==your.FACE)
{
you.getSprung();
}
}

Which I thought was quite clever. So, I felt I owed him a response comensurate with the length of time I made him wait for a reply.

So, I began thinking for an appropriate song. Then I remembered Men Without Hats‘ 1983 classic “Safety Dance” and how it contained a lot of if/then and boolean language (“‘Cause your friends don’t dance and if they don’t dance…” etc.).

The source code.
664 lines.
Developed using Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition and builds cleanly.

I found a great list in the FAQ section of the Gush IM/RSS page.

Now that you’ve read this, I have the perfect excuse to make my conversations even more terse and obscure.

To quote Linnea, “Put it in context!”