1

I'm building a personal Web application using Java EE 6 Technologies (the container is an application server, Jboss AS 7). I'm starting from scratch to create repetitive background tasks, I identified two possible scenarios :

  • Scheduled tasks (e.g, sending bulk mails every sunday night)
  • Trigger tasks based on web event (e.g,running some long background updates from a web action)

What I want to avoid (I don't know if is posible) is to have some background task scattered around my platformm (some of them using cron, others using TimerTask, db jobs, etc..) becoming difficult to maintain.

What are the different approaches to handling repetitive background tasks in a Java web application, taking into account the two previous requirements ?

Related:

Community
  • 1
  • 1
Victor Martinez
  • 1,102
  • 2
  • 8
  • 22

2 Answers2

2

With EE6 you can get rid of Quartz for almost all situations using the TimerService with @Timeout annotations.

And you dont need to write a line of XML to get it working.

There is a nice example in the EE Night Hacks book, also available as source here.

You can add a Timeout method to a bean processing your trigger web events. This way, they can be maintained in one place. You can also modify the timer settings by trigger events.

kostja
  • 60,521
  • 48
  • 179
  • 224
1

I'd still look at Quartz also. I can't comment on TimerService with EE6 as a substitute as I haven't used it, but I found Quartz to be quite useful.

When I used it (quite a few years ago now), it had a config file that closely resembled what you'd find for cron. You could use that to call whatever methods you need to perform your scheduled jobs, and then simply provide some other mechanism to call the method on demand.

Mr Moose
  • 5,946
  • 7
  • 34
  • 69