Running a regular background event in Java web app

Question

In podcast #15, Jeff mentioned he twittered about how to run a regular event in the background as if it was a normal function - unfortunately I can\'t seem to find that through

Answer 1

As mentioned, Quartz is one standard solution. If you don't care about clustering or persistence of background tasks across restarts, you can use the built in ThreadPool support (in Java 5,6). If you use a ScheduledExecutorService you can put Runnables into the background thread pool that wait a specific amount of time before executing.

If you do care about clustering and/or persistence, you can use JMS queues for asynchronous execution, though you will still need some way of delaying background tasks (you can use Quartz or the ScheduledExecutorService to do this).