Is it possible to run a cron job in a web application?

Question

In a java web application (servlets/spring mvc), using tomcat, is it possible to run a cron job type service?

e.g. every 15 minutes, purge the log database.

Can

Answer 1

As documented in Chapter 23. Scheduling and Thread Pooling, Spring has scheduling support through integration classes for the Timer and the Quartz Scheduler (http://www.quartz-scheduler.org/). For simple needs, I'd recommend to go with the JDK Timer.

Note that Java schedulers are usually used to trigger Java business oriented jobs. For sysadmin tasks (like the example you gave), you should really prefer cron and traditional admin tools (bash, etc).