Online / Background Processing and Reporting

Howdy all,

My development background is ABAP. In the ABAP world we are used to different types of development such as transaction programming versus report programming. Further we recognise a distinction between interactive online reports and long-running processes that must run in background.

Does this distinction exist in the (SAP) J2EE world? Are special processes available for long-running tasks?

Cheers,

Scott