create a utility to do background tasks in tomcat

[Poorav Chaudhari <pooravc@yahoo.com>]

I want to create a utilty to do some tasks in the background, every hour or so.
This is part of my web application running on tomcat using struts framework.
What would be a good way achieve this. is there any online resource that shows
me how to implement this in tomcat. I am thinking maybe in my web.xml file i
can start up a servlet that sleeps and wakes itself up on regular intervals of
time. does tomcat start initialize the servlets using the same thread or does
it spawn a different thread for each servlet initialized through web.xml. does
my idea even hold any ground of implementing this or should i go some other
route?

Thanks for your input in advance.

=====
Poorav Chaudhari

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