All, As we're migrating off of JBoss 5.1.0 GA onto OpenEJB 3.1.3 + Tomcat 6, it has finally reached a point where I need to begin improving some pieces of OpenEJB. Specifically, one of the things that would make our lives easier when developing our application is if the TimerService supported an option for a blocking invocation of a Timer and its bean. The desired goal here is to prevent the container from double-invoking (or more) the same bean concurrently if the first request has not completed by the time it needs to fire again. In our application, we want our Stateless Session bean to be fired every 3 seconds, but sometimes it takes us longer than 3 seconds to complete execution, causing the container to fire a second bean (and a third, etc. etc.) causing all sorts of problems for our business app layer.
I will be looking into making minimal changes to the OpenEJB TimerService to find the best way to provide a hint to the TimerService that a bean would want a blocking invocation behavior as outlined above. You will see me on the IRC channel as 'keyhack' talking about this task, so feel free to catch me on there or via e-mail. Thanks, Matthew Jones
