Spring ThreadPoolTaskScheduler vs ThreadPoolTaskExecutor

Question

It is mentioned in the Spring documentation that:

ThreadPoolTaskScheduler actually implements Spring\'s TaskExecutor interface a

Answer 1

• ThreadPoolTaskExecutor is a specialized class for executing tasks.
• ThreadPoolTaskScheduler is a specialized class for scheduling tasks.

The sentence you quoted in the Spring documentation is only saying that you can use a scheduler to execute tasks, but that it is not its main purpose. A ThreadPoolTaskExecutor provides fine-grained configuration over the thread pool through its corePoolSize, maxPoolSize, keepAliveSeconds and queueCapacity properties. A scheduler such as ThreadPoolTaskScheduler does not provide such configuration.

As such, choosing between the two comes down the following question: do I need to execute or schedule execution of tasks?