I need help designing a long running job processing server
<p>I'm about to propose a new architecture for several pieces of the system I'm working on; it's going to entail getting a lot of number crunching and data translation jobs off of tomcat, and on a more fitting platform and I need a little advice.</p>

<p>First, the way this system is currently setup: There is an AS400 and a PostgreSQL database; some of those tables need to be synchronized at various points in the year. An administration application running on Tomcat6 would have a button, "Synchronize" and the struts action class will spawn a new thread to run the job. The job can take anywhere from 15 seconds to 4 days (this is the maximum time we have experienced so far).</p>

<p>I do not like this design. Tomcat is a web server, not a job processing server.</p>

<p>So, the solution I have in mind is to take one of our unused servers and put Jboss 7 on it. then have a simple interface on that job processing server (e.g. web, JMS) that would listen for triggers. when someone clicks on the "synchronize" button on the web page, the job server is sent the signal telling it what job to fire, what parameters are included and to start processing the job.</p>

<p>Years ago I designed a similar concept in job processing where I had a JMS queue that would listen for jobs to come in. when a certain task was added to the queue the system would fire off and run that task. But on that system the jobs would never take more than 5 or 6 seconds, not several days so I'm not sure that JMS Queues would be the best fit here. I looked at Quartz but thats more of a recurring task scheduling system. Although I know I can code around that and make it work, I'm still wondering if thats the best tech for the problem.</p>

<p>Do you have any suggestion?</p>
