Tomcat's Graceful Shutdown with Daemons and Shutdown Hooks

My last couple of blogs have talked about long polling and Spring's DeferredResult technique and to demonstrate these concepts I've shoehorned the code from my Producer Consumer project into a web application. Although the code demonstrates the points made by the blogs it does contain a large number of holes in its logic. Apart from the fact that in a real application you wouldn't use a simple LinkedBlockingQueue, but would choose JMS or some other industrial strength messaging service, and the fact that only one user can get hold of the match updates, there's also the problem it spawns badly behaved threads that don't close down when the JVM terminates.

You may wonder why this should be a problem…

Long Polling with Spring 3.2’s DeferredResult

In our last episode, the CEO of Agile Cowboys Inc had just hired a Java/Spring consultant by giving him the Porsche that he originally bought for his girlfriend. Being upset by the loss of her prize Porsche, the CEO’s girlfriend has told his wife of their affair. His wife, after cutting up the CEO’s suites has filed for divorce. Meanwhile the CEO has implemented a new ‘casual’ dress code at the office and the Java/Spring consultant has just arrived back from a spin in his new Porsche and is sitting down at his desk about to fix the TV company’s software... If this doesn’t mean anything to you then take a look at Long Polling Tomcat With Spring.

The Java/Spring Consultant has to fix the TV Company’s server resource problem before the next big game, and he knows he can do this by implementing Spring’s Deferred Result technique using the Servlet 3 specification as implemented on Tomcat 7¹

The first thing that the Java/Spring consultant does is to check