C H A P T E R  15

Task Scheduling in Spring

Task scheduling is a common feature in enterprise applications. Task scheduling mainly is composed of three parts: the task (which is the piece of business logic needed to run at a specific time or on a regular basis), the trigger (which specifies the condition under which the task should be executed), and the scheduler (which executes the task based on the information from the trigger).

Specifically, this chapter will cover the following topics:

• Task scheduling in Spring: We will discuss how Spring supports task scheduling, focusing on the TaskScheduler abstraction introduced in Spring 3. We’ll also cover scheduling scenarios such as fixed-interval scheduling and cron expressions.
• Asynchronous task execution: We will discuss how to use the new @Async annotation in Spring 3 to execute tasks asynchronously.