As you are aware JSR-236, Concurrency Utilities for the Java EE platform, is now a candidate for addition into Java EE 7. While it is a critical enabling API it is not necessarily obvious why it is so important. This is especially true with existing features like EJB 3 @Asynchronous, Servlet 3 async and JAX-RS 2 async. On his blog DZone MVB Sander Mak does an excellent job of explaining the motivation and importance of JSR-236.

Perhaps even more importantly, he discusses potential issues with the API such alignment with CDI and Java SE Fork/Join. Read the excellent write-up here!