title: Running a regular background event in Java web app
body: <p>In podcast #15, Jeff mentioned he twittered about how to run a regular event in the background as if it was a normal function - unfortunately I can't seem to find that through twitter. Now I need to do a similar thing and are going to throw the question to the masses.</p>
  
  <p>My current plan is when the first user (probably me) enters the site it starts a background thread that waits until the alloted time (hourly on the hour) and then kicks off the event blocking the others (I am a Windows programmer by trade so I think in terms of events and WaitOnMultipleObjects) until it completes.</p>
  
  <p>How did Jeff do it in Asp.Net and is his method applicable to the Java web-app world?</p>