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.”
