Strait Fram Singapuur

First thing I would like to admit is - Sorry for being away for so long !!!
Next let's quickly move to second thing which is the topic of today's very simple post - scheduling jobs in JBoss :)

In many projects there is a requirement for cron-like task scheduling, be it for batch processing, automatic system maintenance or some other regular job. Few days back I had to create a cron job to sync data from external source to the local database. I was having so many options to implement the functionality like:

• java.util.Timer
  
• EJB Timers
  
• Unix Cron jobs
  
• Quartz Scheduler
  
• Custom Timer
  

But in the end I settled for a very simple solution (in terms of time it took to implement the whole stuff) that is as effective as anything mentioned above.

org.jboss.varia.scheduler.Scheduler
----------------------------------------
The good thing is, this Scheduler directly invokes a callback on an instance of a user defined class, or an operation of a user specified MBean. Let's say we want to print 'Hello World!' (our so called task) after every 30 seconds from the the time of deployment.

package com.gognamunish.test;
import org.jboss.varia.scheduler.Schedulable;
/**
* Implement Schedulable interface and override perform() function. 
* @author Munish Gogna
*/
public class HelloWorld implements Schedulable
{
    public void perform( Date now, long remainingRepetitions ) {
        System.out.println("Hello World");
    }
}

Next just copy the following mbean definition in /deploy/scheduler-service.xml file of the Jboss profile.

      true
      com.gognamunish.test.HelloWorld
      0
      30000
      -1
      true    

      
   

Once the deployment is done, this task will be called after every 30 seconds, so easy and simple right? We can also pass input parameters to our target class using 'SchedulableArguments' attribute, just make sure you define the right constructor in the class that implements Schedulable interface. e.g If we want to pass the location and environment of the server, we have to add following lines to the mbean definition:

Singapore,Test
 java.lang.String,java.lang.String

HelloWorld class now has to define a constructor as follow:

public HelloWorld (String location, String environment){
 this.location=location;
 this.environment=environment;
}

Note: This example has dependency on scheduler-plugin.jar which can be obtained from /common/lib folder of $JBOSS_HOME (it is sad that it's not available in maven or jboss repository)

Give it a Try !!!!