The job executor is a component for monitoring and executing jobs in a standard Java environment. Jobs are used for timers and asynchronous messages. In an enterprise environment, JMS and the EJB Timer Service can be used for that purpose. Conversely, the job executor can be used in an environment where neither JMS nor EJB are available.

The job executor component is packaged in the core jbpm-jpdl library, but it needs to be deployed in one of the following ways: either register the JobExecutorLauncher servlet context listener in the web app deployment descriptor to start/stop the job executor during creation/destruction of the servlet context, or start up a separate JVM and start the job executor in there programatically.