What Celery is doing is very much akin to EIP, and SEDA with convenient task scheduling… (all you have left to do is add some DB, and async HTTP networking and you have got a complete enterprise quality stack).
Basically in Java there is the Spring way, the Java EE way, and the Hadoop way:
- Spring: Spring Integration + Spring Batch + RabbitMQ
- Java EE: Mule + Quartz or EJB Scheduling + HornetMQ
- Hadoop: Capacity + ZooKeeper
Those are roughly in order of ease of setting up.