Question

I am developing a web application where I need to run a thread for 60 seconds which needs to check for response coming from a webservice. If the response arrives within 60 seconds I will forward to success othewise I will forward to a time out page after 60 seconds. I am using JSF 2.0?
I have thought of using the Timer but not sure whenther I can run the timer for sprcefic amount of time only.

Is there any smart solution for this ??

Answer 1

Do absolutely not use Timer for this! It’s funny for one-time-run desktop applications, but it has severe potential problems when used in a lifetime long running Java EE web application.

Rather use the executors from the java.util.concurrent package. Here’s a kickoff example:

ExecutorService executor = Executors.newSingleThreadExecutor(); // An application wide thread pool executor is better.

Callable<InputStream> task = new Callable<InputStream>() {
    @Override
    public InputStream call() throws Exception {
        // Do here your webservice call job.
        return new URL("http://stackoverflow.com").openStream();
    }
};

try {
    InputStream input = executor.invokeAny(Arrays.asList(task), 60, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
    // Successful! Forward to success page here.
} catch (TimeoutException e) {
    // Timeout occurred. Forward to timeout page here.
}