Can i spawn a thread from a servlet?

Question

I would like to ask a basic question before i get on to my main question .

Lets say i am running a simple Java program, which spawns a thread in the main function. W

Answer 1

When you want your application to exit even though you still have running threads, you have to mark your thread as a daemon thread:

Thread t = new Thread(myRunnable);
t.setDaemon(true),
t.start();

This is especially important when you do that in an application server, otherwise the server cannot be shut down!

If you do that repeatedly you might want to consider a ThreadPool to make this more efficient

Answer 2

• There is such thing as parent and child threads, but you don't have a lot of control on that. For example there's InheritableThreadLocal, where you can store variables for a thread hierarchy.

• you can spawn a new thread from a servlet. Prefer Java 5 executors framework

• if using servlet 3.0, take a look at its asynchronous processing capabilities.