Pro Spring 2.5

Chapter 12. Job Scheduling with Spring

Most application logic happens in response to some form of user action, such as a button click or a form submission. However, in many applications certain processes must be invoked without user interaction, usually at a given interval. For example, you might have a process that cleans out temporary files once an hour or a process that creates a data export from a database and sends it to an external system once a day at midnight. Most nontrivial applications require some kind of scheduling support—if not directly related to business logic of the application then to support system housekeeping.

When you are building scheduled tasks for your application, creating a task that runs once an hour or once a day is ...