Concurrency utilities for JavaEE

Poor performance can be detrimental to an application’s success. Performance can be measured in many ways. Whether application users can initiate tasks and then move onto others without waiting, or whether a database needs to be queried and return results without blocking a user interface, the bottom line is that waiting for tasks to be completed can become a user nightmare, making a poorly performing application difficult to use. In Java SE, the idea of threading is a standard technique that is used to help prevent bad user experiences,because it allows for long-running tasks to be spawned into a separate thread and executed  in the background without waits occurring. Java EE 7 includes the concurrency utilities for Java EE, which standardize a solution for using application components and Java EE services in an asynchronous manner. The API provides an easy path for those familiar with Java SE concurrency to use it for enterprise applications. Before Java EE 6, it was more difficult to perform concurrent tasks with server side applications,because application server containers typically ran application component code on a thread that was managed by the container, and container supplied object access occurred within the same thread. It is unwise to spawn new threads in an application server environment using java.lang.Thread or java.util .Timer, because that can lead to unreliable results. The situation improved when asynchronous Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) was introduced with Java EE 6, which allowed processing to occur asynchronously on a thread other than the request handling thread. The concurrency utilities for Java EE build upon asynchronous EJB, and introduce a set of application server concurrency services that assist in the asynchronous execution of tasks in an effort to provide a more complete concurrency solution for Java enterprise applications.