[Building Sakai] Instantiating a new session Thread

[Branden Visser]

Hi all,

There comes times when I want a user action to be executed as an 
asynchronous process (e.g., lengthy processes).

Until now, I've been invoking the asynchronous request using a 
javascript call. Ideally, I could start up a new Thread that has all the 
initialization as running through the Sakai request filter.

Can you just manually send a thread through the Sakai request filter? 
Has anyone been able to achieve a similar effect somehow?

Thanks,
Branden