On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Jeremy Boynes wrote:
Please review the spec in detail - the EJB Timer Service has requirements for persistent timers and IIRC notifications for events that happened when the server was down.
True, but I think we could write something simple using a file for persistence and java.util.Timer if we wanted to meet the minimum requirements. There is no facility in the spec for cron-style scheduling -- the only scheduling options are millisecond offsets, IIRC. Granted, we could certainly integrate a fancier package and offer more "value added" features. I'm trying to say I don't think we *need* to go there unless we want to.
The only real downside to Timer it is the API. You have to cache a ref to the TimerTask to cancel it later - you can't just ask the Timer to cancel a task of a given name. You also can't pause or alter the schedule a TimerTask, but that's just a matter of doing cancel() and reschedule() against a cached ref. A Timer can be wrapped with any extra functionality later and it would save you writing the core scheduler from scratch. I wouldn't bother not using java.util.Timer.
Bill de h�ra
