WebSphere Portal 7. Longrunning tasks in portlets.

Sometimes operations in portlets can take a long time to complete, like a report generating task. It is better not to execute such tasks in a synchronous way, because :

• they block the web container thread, which slows down user satisfaction;
• make the appearance of application to freeze;
• the task can take up time of no more then request timeout;
• you cannot cancel the task;
• you don't see the progress of your task.