Ok,
what is J2EE stance on startup classes? I ask because I have a couple of situations:

1) I would like to create a singlton object that can be accessed from stateless session beans.
2) A montior class that will call another class and in turn an entity bean when an external event arrives (file arrive). Is this illegal?

Any thoughts are much appeciated.

There is no specific mention of Startup Classes in J2EE specs per se. Most of the app servers however come with this option with proprietary methods to configure them.

Check this link for a similar thread.
https://www.theserverside.com/discussion/thread.jsp?thread_id=10180