On Wed, 9 May 2001, Taylor Cowan wrote:
> What do you folks think about a scheduled event daemon? J2EE doesn't cover
> this, I don't think any other frameworks do it yet, and it is similar to
> request event handling except the events are "anonymous" and don't contain a
> request object.
>
I think this would be an intriguing addition.
I've seen approaches to this in Turbine, and (I think) Enhydra, but I
don't know of any specific implementations based on Struts.
> It could be implemented around a server startup servlet which reads a config
> file, much like the Action servlet, and at designated intervals invokes the
> "action" class specified in the config file. Instead of passing in the
> request object it would only be able to send the servlet context. There are
> a lot of uses for something like this, for instance, downloading messages
> from a pop3 server, checking load info and sending out warnings, or anything
> that we might have used cron to do 'back in the day'. (Well, some of you may
> not know what Cron is and it's probably better that way ).
>
Ah, you should really say nice things about cron! That's where your
nightly builds of Struts come from, after all. :-) :-) :-)
> I suppose it could be implemented entirely separate to Struts, however, it
> would make a nice addition.
>
It seems to me that a generic "background job scheduling" class library
would be the way to do this, with a Struts-based administration front
end. The back end part of this might also be appropriate to consider for
the Jakarta Commons project <http://jakarta.apache.org/commons> so that it
could be used (and enhanced by users of ;-) other environments as well.
> Taylor Cowan
>
Craig
