Strive for Simplicity: So Long Quartz, yello' Cron4j!
A while ago I wrote that Cron4j seems like a nice replacement for venerable kitchen-sink-scheduler, Quartz. This especially in cases where all-you-can-eat-buffet of Quartz scheduling feature is not needed; and when resulting largish set of dependencies is bit hard to swallow. And now I finally found time to test the idea in practice, tinkering with a little backburner project of mine which only needs very basic Cron-like triggering to start task.
And yes: so far Cron4j has delivered as expected for my use case: it does what is needed (just reading Cron-expressions, doing callbacks), has reasonable documentation, and overall has the attractive smell of "Just-works-ness" that good libraries have. It is probably too early to declare a victory, but so far things are looking good.
The one issue I had to deal with, which I need to follow up further is that cron4j only supports limited set of 5 fields as opposed to all 7 (6 mandatory, one optional) as documented on Cron expressions Wikipedia page. Fields missing are seconds and years; which in general are not all that useful. But it would have been better to support standard notation: and specifically omission of seconds is unfortunate since cron expressions are not portable.
Still, simple is good, and I think Cron4j will be a good little helper library for my toolbox.
