What are some technically challenging, interesting or cool tasks

that you did?

Keeping an EJB application be aware of the current user details
One had a requirement where the most of the EJB application need to be aware of the
current logged in user and some information about the user. This was a J2EE Webservice
implemented using HTTP router module and EJB implementation. Well there is nothing
like an HTTP session in EJB. You can use a Stateful session bean, but since this it is
fronted by web-tier there is no way to keep the session across from the user to the
Stateful session bean. Besides our requirement is to make the current user available to the
entire application without polluting all interfaces with additional user info. What I ended
up doing is to extract the user information at the session boundary layer and save it in a
user session object based on ThreadLocal and expose is through a static method. EJB
applications are multi user. A user session object saved in a request thread will be
available everywhere in the current request scope and all classes can get it statically
without polluting this information in the interfaces through out the call stack. Another
problem was that we were doing some concurrent asynchronous calls to some external
webservices using asynchronous worker threads. Asynchronous beans essentially use a
pool of container threads that the application can use to accomplish some parallel
processing since direct use of Threading is prohibited in J2EE container. State from
ThreadLocal are not transferred to the child threads, so we need to use
InheritableThreadLocal. But InheritableThreadLocal is not thread-safe and even this case
the Worker thread does not clear out the state after going back to the pool. It happens that
we need to manually pass the user information to these worker threads from the parent
thread while initializing the worker threads.