Annotations for timer methods

[jacek99]

I'm reading the Spring 2 reference doc on timer methods and it all seems to refer to (rather verbose) XML configuration. Is there any way to annotate a method via annotations and have Spring execute that via a timer?

e.g.:

//execute once an hour
@Timer(3600000)
public void doSomeCleanup() {}

[Mark Fisher]

In Spring 3.0, we're adding @Scheduled as well as namespace support (e.g. <scheduled-tasks/>). The namespace support is already in SVN, and the annotation is in development.

There is also an @Async annotation (for running a method via a TaskExecutor).

[liamknox]

Is this actually in 3.0 as I couldnt see the annotation in the latest API JavaDocs?
Seems something that would naturally lend itself to integration with Quartz etc. i.e. something like @Scheduled(trigger=) or @Scheduled(cronExpression=)

[Mark Fisher]

The @Scheduled annotation is available on the SVN head and will be in 3.0 RC1. It supports cron without requiring Quartz now that Spring has its own cron trigger.

[liamknox]

Thanks for the reply

But if you wanted to use this to integrate with Quartz is that supported? For example Quartz also provides Job Persistence, Remoting etc, but it feels natural that the Job invocation itself could be just a vanilla Java method. Indeed you could also consider JobExecutionContext variables being mapped to the method invocation by annotations.

I would of thought this would be similar to the Spring @Cached annotation where the caching implementation can be specified ?

[waveman]

When using Spring 3.0: Can I use the @Scheduled annotation in a way that the actual rate/delay value is read from a property?

I imagine something like:

@Scheduled(fixedDelay=#{systemProperties.blaDelay})
public void doSomething() {
  // ...
}