10.6. Scheduling jobs

Liferay, because it’s a platform, contains functionality for running various jobs on a schedule. You can make these jobs do pretty much anything you want, because they have the same access to all of Liferay’s APIs as any other plugin. You can, for example, write a mailing list manager application that lets users subscribe to receive email newsletters. These newsletters can be composed and then sent on a schedule—say, at midnight on Monday morning, so the newsletters are waiting in subscribers’ inboxes first thing on the first workday of the week.

Depending on the application, there can be any number of use cases that require a scheduler. Liferay’s Calendar portlet uses it to send event notifications. Some enterprises use it to import users from other systems. Of course, you can use Liferay’s scheduler to run whatever jobs you may need to run on a regular basis.