Java Garage

Using TimerTask to Do Stuff at Intervals

If you've ever used a UNIX cron job, you're used to needing to do stuff at timed intervals. Say you want to gzip the log files and move them in an archive every night at 3 a.m. Or maybe you need to start a process that will go out and check a server for some kind of update, and you want to check it every hour.

I once wrote an application that received user signups, and wrote them to a file. There were a lot of signups every day, but there wasn't a need to act upon them immediately. So the client asked that every hour we would do some junk to the data and then transfer it over to their AS/400 via FTP. Then they would do some junk to the data over there, and my app would check every couple of hours to see ...