Our application has parts that need to run in parallel within an Application Server. This includes JMS queus and topics, scheduled jobs (Quartz), and silimar functionality. These parts need their own dedicated resources so they don't starve each other. We are currently using several ExecutorService thread pools.
It has been brough to our attention that using unmanged threads within a container is a bad and non-standard solution. In addition, we would like the added functionality of dynamically scaling the size of the pools. It seemed that leaveraging WorkManager would sovle both problems.
We are using JBoss AS 5.1 and it appears that WorkManager is not available via JNDI (unlike in WebSphere AS). Furthermore, Weston comments that JBoss WorkManager is reserved for use for Resource Adapaters (http://community.jboss.org/message/243460). Weston suggests the notion of creating a custom MBean to achive this functionality.
What is the JBoss way for achiving parallel processing? Is there a better way to solve these problems?