Terracotta,
a provider of some of application-scale and performance software, has upgraded
its Quartz
job scheduler.
The company has introduced
new enhancements to the open-source Quartz job scheduler in key areas, such as
ease of use, performance, management and monitoring and control. Quartz can be
integrated with, or used alongside, virtually any Java application.
“Quartz has a
well-established reputation as the most widely used job scheduler; its
lightweight properties and ease of use have made it very popular with Java developers,”
James House, founder of the Quartz project, said in a statement. “However, as
enterprise applications become more complex, end-users are demanding more
control of when and where jobs are executed. I'm pleased to see that Terracotta
has made the investment to continue the improvement of open-source Quartz and
also produce a new commercial release of Quartz Scheduler that includes
powerful enhancements. These new features enable enterprises to monitor and
manage job scheduling from a GUI, and programmatically specify which machines
to use for the execution of each job, thus maximizing compute resources without
requiring extensive custom development or investment in more cumbersome,
expensive job-scheduling products.”
Quartz can be used to create
simple or complex schedules for executing tens, hundreds or even
tens-of-thousands of jobs—jobs whose tasks are defined as standard Java
components that may execute virtually anything you may program them to do,
according to the Quartz project site. The Quartz Scheduler includes many
enterprise-class features, such as Java Transaction API transactions and
clustering.
Terracotta delivered three
new Quartz enhancements, including Quartz 2.0, the new version of the core
open-source Quartz library features a simplified and more feature-rich API,
with better performance. Notable features and
improvements of Quartz 2.0 include a simplified, "fluent"
configuration API that's easier to use and learn. It also comes with
performance improvements that speed job processing by up to 30 percent in
high-load cases.
The new Quartz Manager is a
Web-based GUI that enables the monitoring and management of job-scheduling
actions in production and development environments. Quartz Manager enables
users to: Gain immediate visibility into job schedules, status and activity;
readily add or modify scheduling information; manage multiple instances of
Quartz Scheduler through a single interface; and simplify ongoing management of
job scheduling and execution.
Meanwhile, the third new
enhancement, Quartz Where, is built on the Terracotta platform. Quartz Where
allows users to direct jobs to specific machines, or to any machine with
specific available resources—a critical capability in distributed,
heterogeneous clusters with large numbers of mission-critical jobs, Terracotta
said. This enables the effective management of increasing workloads in
traditional data center or cloud architectures. And for applications using
both Quartz Scheduler and Enterprise Ehcache, Quartz Where provides the ability
to control where jobs execute based on the location of data in a distributed
cache.
“Our goal with this release
is to extend the value of the industry’s de facto standard for Java job
scheduling for the hundreds of thousands of users around the world,” Mike
Allen, head of product management at Terracotta, said in a statement. “With a
simplified API, and tooling that provides greater visibility and control of the
overall scheduling process, we are reducing development costs and enhancing
operational control for groups, ranging from small Java development shops to
enterprise IT departments. When combined with Terracotta’s other performance
and scale solutions, Quartz Scheduler provides a unique solution for cloud
orchestration.”
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