Introduction to Quartz Scheduler

In this section you will learn about the importance of Job Scheduling in your java application. You will also learn how Quartz Job Scheduler helps you to develop job scheduling application in Java.

What is Quartz Scheduler?

Quartz is a full-featured, open source job scheduling framework written entirely in Java. It can be integrated with, or used along side virtually any J2EE or J2SE application - from the smallest stand-alone application to the largest e-commerce system. Job scheduler is a system that is responsible for executing other software components when a pre-determined (scheduled) time arrives.
     
Quartz is quite flexible. It contains multiple usage paradigms that can be used separately or together to achieve the desired behavior. And it enable you to write the code in the way that seems most natural to your project.

Quartz is a fault-tolerant, and can persist your scheduled jobs between system shutdown and restarts. Quartz is very useful for simply executing certain system process on given schedules.

What is Quartz - From a Software Component View?

Quartz contains all of the core Quartz functionality and it is distributed as a small java library (.jar file). Scheduler interface is the main interface (API) to this functionality. It provides some simple operations like scheduling jobs, unscheduling jobs, starting/stopping/pausing the scheduler.

If you want to schedule you software components then it must implement the Job interface which override the execute() method. If you want components have to notify when scheduled fire-time arrives, then you should implements either the TriggerListener or JobListener interface.

Why Quartz Scheduler?

Quartz Scheduler can be integrated with, or used along side virtually any J2EE or J2SE application - from the smallest stand-alone application to the largest e-commerce system. Quartz scheduler is a fault-tolerant, and can persist you scheduled jobs between system shutdown and restarts. It contains the all core Quartz functionality. Once you configure the Job class and set up the schedule, Quartz will take care of the rest. When the Scheduler determines the notifying time to your job, the Quartz framework will call the execute() method on your Job class. You don't have to report anything back to the Scheduler. If you configure your Job to be called again at a later time, the framework will take care of calling again at the right time.

In the next section you will learn how to download Quartz Job Scheduler and then configure the development environment in eclipse.