Alternatives to Quartz Scheduler in JBoss EAP 8 / 7 / 6

Resolution

In JBoss EAP 4 / EAP 5, The Quartz Job Scheduler is used internally by the Java EE Timer Service and Seam Asynchronous methods with the Quartz Dispatcher. It is only supported within these contexts¹.

JavaEE 6 has updated the EJB Timer service to include a scheduling capability similar to Quartz, see The Java EE 6 Tutorial² and the example below. You can also use @Timeout and the TimerService API to schedule and cancel timers. This is the recommended way to do timers and scheduling as it is the JavaEE 6 specification.

JBoss EAP 6 does not include Quartz as it does not use Quartz for implementing EJB Timers. If your application depends on Quartz and you cannot use EJB Timers, then you will need to package Quartz with your application and bootstrap it or work though the Quartz community to get a new release of Quartz with an updated QuartzService MBean.

Note: In JBoss EAP 6.1 and later the old JBoss MBean support classes ServiceMBean and ServiceMBeanSupport have been included to allow old MBean implemenations that extended them to be deployed³.

Using JavaEE Timers

Below is an example of using JavaEE 6 EJB Timers with a Cron like schedule configuration:

import java.util.Date;
import javax.annotation.Resource;
import javax.ejb.Schedule;
import javax.ejb.Singleton;
import javax.ejb.Startup;
import javax.ejb.Timeout;
import javax.ejb.Timer;
import javax.ejb.TimerService;

@Singleton
@Startup()
public class TimerScheduleBean
{
  // Here we inject a reference to the timerService
  @Resource
  private TimerService timerService;

  // Schedule timer will fire every 5 seconds
  @Schedule(second="*/5", minute="*", hour="*")
  public void scheduledTimeout()
  {
    System.out.println("Schedule Timer fired - " + new Date());
  }
}

Including Quartz in your application or a custom module in JBoss EAP 6

If you want to use Quartz, you can package it in your application or create a JBoss Module for it by placing the quart jars in $JBOSS_HOME/modules/org/quartz/main/ then create a $JBOSS_HOME/modules/org/quartz/main/module.xml containing something such as:

<module xmlns="urn:jboss:module:1.1" name="org.quartz">
  <resources>
    <resource-root path="quartz-all.jar"/>
  </resources>
  <dependencies>
    <module name="org.slf4j"/>
    <module name="javax.api"/>
  </dependencies>
</module>

You can create the above custom module by the following CLI command:

module add --name=org.quartz --resources=/path/to/quartz-all.jar --dependencies=javax.api,org.slf4j

Then any application that needs to use your Quartz classes can add a org.quartz to the deployment's META-INF/MANIFEST.MF Dependencies: section or by adding org.quartz as a depdendency to the top level deployment's jboss-deployment-structure.xml⁴⁵.

If you need Quartz to be bootstrapped when the application is deployed, use a JavaEE 6 Singleton with @PostConstruct such as:

@javax.ejb.Singleton
@javax.ejb.Startup
public class QuartzBootstrapSingleton
{
    private Logger log = Logger.getLogger(this.getClass().getName());

    @javax.annotation.PostConstruct
    public void start()
    {
       // INSERT Quartz bootstrapping here
    }

    @javax.annotation.PreDestroy
    public void stop()
    {
      // INSERT Quartz shutdown / clean up here
    }
}

References: