Welcome to the QuickStart guide for Quartz 1.x. As this guide takes shape, expect to see details of:
- Downloading Quartz
- Installing Quartz
- Building Quartz yourself from source
- Configuring Quartz to your own particular needs
- Starting a sample application
NB. At the time of writing, the latest version of Quartz is 1.4.3. The guide will be version-independent wherever possible, but bear this fact in mind.
Download & Installation
To download Quartz, visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/quartz/
and click the download link next to the Quartz 1.4 package.
If you can't be bothered with all of that, here are direct download links for the various pieces of Quartz:
- Quartz 1.4.3 (.zip) - the main Quartz package in zip format (primarily for Windows people)
- Quartz 1.4.3 (.tar.gz) - the main Quartz package in tar/gzip format (primarily for *nix people)
- Quartz Web-App - the Quartz web application, which allows you to monitor a scheduler via a nice web interface
Once you've downloaded and unpacked the zipfile, it's time to install it so that your application can see it.
The JARs
The Quartz package includes a number of jar files, located in lib under the main Quartz directory. The main Quartz library is imaginatively named quartz.jar. In order to use any of Quartz's features, this jar must be located on your classpath.
Once you've downloaded Quartz, unzip it somewhere, grab quartz.jar and put it where you want it. (If you need information on how to unzip files, go away and learn before you go anywhere near a development environment or the Internet in general. Seriously.)
I use Quartz primarily within an application server environment, so my preference is to include quartz.jar within my enterprise application (.ear file). However, if you want to make Quartz available to many applications then simply make sure it's on the classpath of your appserver.
Quartz depends on a number of jars. To use all the features of Quartz, all of these jars must also exist on your classpath. If you're building a standalone Quartz application, I suggest you simply add all of them to the classpath. If you're using Quartz within an app server environment, at least some of the jars will already exist on the classpath, so you can afford (if you want) to be a bit more selective as to which jars you include.
NB. In an appserver environment, beware of strange results when accidentally including two different versions of the same jar. For example, WebLogic includes an implementation of J2EE (inside weblogic.jar) which may differ to the one in servlet.jar. In this case, it's usually better to leave servlet.jar out of your application, so you know which classes are being utilised.
The properties file
Quartz uses a properties file called (again, kudos on the originality) quartz.properties. This isn't necessary at first, but to use anything but the most basic configuration it must be located on your classpath.
Again, to give an example based on my personal situation, my application was developed using WebLogic Workshop. I keep all of my configuration files (including quartz.properties) in a project under the root of my application. When I package everything up into a .ear file, the config project gets packaged into a .jar which is included within the final .ear. This automatically puts quartz.properties on the classpath.
Building from the source code
Watch this space for details on how to build Quartz yourself, for whatever reason you may have (I won't pry into your private reasons...).
Configuration
This is the big bit! Quartz is a very configurable application. The best way to configure Quartz is to edit quartz.properties.
The first thing to do is to look at example_quartz.properties, located in docs\config under the main Quartz directory. Alternatively, click the link below to view the version of example_quartz.properties that is distributed with Quartz 1.4.2:
I would suggest you create your own quartz.properties based on the example file, rather than making a copy of example_quartz.properties and deleting the bits you don't need. It's neater that way, and you'll explore more of what Quartz has to offer.
NB. I've discovered that example_quartz.properties doesn't contain all of the possible properties. Hopefully this will be remedied in the next version.
To get up and running quickly, a basic quartz.properties looks something like this:
The scheduler created by this configuration has the following characteristics:
- org.quartz.scheduler.instanceName - It's called "Sched1" (doh)
- org.quartz.scheduler.rmi.export - The scheduler is local, which means it can't be accessed using RMI (Remote Method Invocation.
- org.quartz.threadPool.threadCount - There are 3 threads in the thread pool, which means that a maximum of 3 jobs can be run simultaneously.
- org.quartz.jobStore.class - All of Quartz's data, such as details of jobs and triggers, is held in memory (rather than in a database).
Even if you have a database and want to use it with Quartz, I suggest you get Quartz working with the RamJobStore before you open up a whole new dimension by working with a database.
Starting a sample application
Now you've downloaded and installed Quartz, it's time to get a sample application up and running. The following code obtains an instance of the scheduler, starts it, then shuts it down:
import org.quartz.Scheduler;
import org.quartz.SchedulerException;
import org.quartz.impl.StdSchedulerFactory;
public class QuartzTest {
public static void main(String[] args) {
try {
Scheduler scheduler = StdSchedulerFactory.getDefaultScheduler();
scheduler.start();
scheduler.shutdown();
} catch (SchedulerException se) {
se.printStackTrace();
}
}
}
NB. Once you obtain a scheduler using StdSchedulerFactory.getDefaultScheduler(), your application will not terminate until you call scheduler.shutdown().
If you have not set up logging, all logs will be sent to the console and your output will look something like this:
